"You hired me yourself," Elin reminded him.
"Yes, but I'm wired into professional mode at the moment." The rigger packed up his tools, walked off. "Looks like wevre almost ready."
"Good." Elin flung herself down on the cot and lay back, hands folded across her chest. "Hey, I feel like I should be holding a lily!"
"I'm going to hook you into the project intercom so you don't get too bored between episodes." The air about her flickered, and a clutch of images overlaid her vision. Ghosts walked through the air, stared at her from deep within the ground. "Now we'll shut off the external senses." The world went away, but the illusory people remained, each within a separate hexagonal field of vision. It was like seeing through the eyes of a fly.
There was a sudden, overwhelming sense of Tory's presence, and a sourceless voice said to her, "This will take a minute. Amuse yourself by calling up a few friends." Then he was gone.
Elin floated, free of body, free of sensation, almost godlike in her detachment. She idly riffled through the images, stopped at a chubby little man drawing a black line across his forehead. Hello, Hans, she thought.
He looked up and winked. "How's it hanging, kid?"
Not so bad. What're you up to?
"My job. I'm the black-box monitor this shift." He added an orange starburst to the band, surveyed the job critically in a pocket mirror. "I sit here with my finger on the button"— one hand disappeared below his terminal—"and if I get the word, I push. That sets off explosives in the condenser units and blows the dome. Pfffft. Out goes the air."
She considered it: a sudden volcano of oxygen spouting up and across the lunar plains. Human bodies thrown up from the surface, scattering, bursting under explosive decompression.
That's grotesque, Hans.
"Oh, it's safe. The button doesn't connect unless I'm wetwired into my job."
Even so.
"Just a precaution; a lot of the research that goes on here wouldn't be allowed without this kind of security. Relax—I haven't lost a dome yet."
The intercom cut out, and again Elin felt Tory's presence. "We're trying a Trojan horse program this time—inserting you into the desired mental states instead of making you the states. We've encapsulated your surface identity and routed the experimental programs through a secondary level. So with this series, rather than identifying with the programs, you'll perceive them all indirectly."
Tory, you have got to be the most jargon-ridden human being in existence. How about repeating that in English?
"I'll show you."
Suddenly Elin was englobed in a sphere of branching crimson lines, dark and dull, that throbbed slowly. Lacy and organic, it looked the way she imagined the veins in her forehead to be like when she had a headache.
"That was anger," Tory said. "Your mind shunted it off into visual imagery because it didn't identify the anger with itself."
That's what you're going to do then—program me into the God-state so that 1 can see it but not experience it?
"Ultimately. Though I doubt you'll be able to come up with pictures. More likely, you'll feel that you're in the presence of God." He withdrew for a moment, leaving her more than alone, almost nonexistent. Then he was back. "We start slowly, though. The first session runs you up to the basic metaprogramming level, integrates all your mental processes, and puts you in low-level control of them. The nontechnical term for this is making the Christ. Don't fool around with anything you see or sense."
His voice faded, she was alone, and then everything changed.
She was in the presence of someone wonderful.
Elin felt that someone near at hand, and struggled to open the eyes she no longer possessed; she had to see. Her existence opened, and people began appearing before her.
"Careful," Tory said. "You've switched on the intercom again."
/ want to see!
"There's nobody to see. That's just your own mind. But if you want, you can keep the intercom on."
Oh. It was disappointing. She was surrounded by love, by a crazily happy sense that the universe was holy, by wisdom deeper than the world. By all rights, it had to come from a source greater than herself.
Reason was not sufficiently strong to override emotion. She riffled through the intercom, bringing up image after image and discarding them all, searching.
When she had run through the entire project staff, she began hungrily scanning the crater's public monitors.
Agtechs in the trellis farms were harvesting strawberries and sweet peas. Elin could taste them on her tongue. Somebody was seining up algae from the inner lake, and she felt the weight of the net in callused hands. Not far from where she lay, a couple was making love in a grove of saplings and—
Tory, I don't think I can take this. It's too intense.
"You're the test pilot."
Dammit, Tory!
Donna Landis materialized on the intercom. "She's right, Shostakovich. You haven't buffered her enough."
"It didn't seem wise to risk dissociative effects by cranking her ego up too high."
"Who's paying for all this, hah?"
Tory grumbled something inaudible and dissolved the world.
Elin floated in blackness, soothing and relaxing. She felt good. She had needed this little vacation from the tensions and pressures of her new personality. Taking the job had been the right thing to do, even if it did momentarily displease Tory.
Tory… She smiled mentally. He was exasperating at times, but still she was coming to rely on having him around. She was beginning to think she was in love with him.
A lesser love, perhaps. Certainly not the love that is the Christ.
Well, maybe so. Still, on a human level, Tory filled needs in her she hadn't known existed. It was too much effort to argue with herself, though. Her thoughts drifted away into a wordless, luxurious reveling in the bodiless state, free from distractions, carefree and disconnected.
Nothing is disconnected. All the universe is a vast net of intermeshing programs. Elin was amused at herself. That had sounded like something Tory would say. She'd have to watch it; she might love the man, but she didn't want to end up talking like him.
You worry needlessly. The voice of God is subtle, but it is not your own.
Elin started. She searched through her mind for an open intercom channel, didn't find one. Hello, she thought. Who said that?
The answer came to her not in words, but in a sourceless assertion of identity. It was cool, emotionless, something she could not describe even to herself, but by the same token absolute and undeniable.
It was God.
Then Tory was back and the voice, the presence was gone. Tory? she thought. / think I just had a religious experience.
"That's very common under sensory deprivation—the mind clears out a few old programs. Nothing to worry about. Now relax for a jiff while I plug you back in—how does that feel?"
The presence was back again, but not nearly so strongly as before; she could resist the urge to chase after it. That's fine, Tory, but listen, I really think—
"Let's leave analysis to those who have been programmed for it, shall we?"
The lovers strolled aimlessly through a meadow, the grass brushing up higher than their waists. Biological night was coming; the agtechs flicked the daylight switch off and on twice in warning.
"It was real, Tory. She talked with me; I'm not making it up."
Tory ran a hand through his dark, curly hair, looking distracted. "Well, assuming that my professional opinion was wrong—and I'll be the first to admit that the program is a bit egocentric—I still don't think we have to stoop to mysticism for an explanation."
To the far side of Magritte, a waterfall was abruptly shut off. The stream of water scattered, seeming to dissolve in the air. "I thought you said she was God."
"I only said that to bait Landis. I don't mean that she's literally God, just godlike. Her thought processes are a million years more efficiently organized than ours. God is just a conveni
ent metaphor."
"Um. So what's your explanation?"
"There's at least one terminal on the island—the things are everywhere. She probably programmed it to cut into the intercom without the channels seeming to be open."
"Could she do that?"
"Why not? She has that million-year edge on us—and she used to be a wetware tech; all wetware techs are closet computer hacks." He did not look at her, had not looked at her for some time.
"Hey." She reached out to take his hand. "What's wrong with you tonight?"
"Me?" He did not meet her eyes. "Don't mind me. I'm just sulking because you took the job. I'll get over it."
"What's wrong with the job?"
"Nothing. I'm just being moody."
She guided his arm around her waist, pressed up against him. "Well, don't be. It's nothing you can control—I have to have work to do. My boredom threshold is very low."
"I know that." He finally turned to face her, smiled sadly. "I do love you, you know."
"Well… maybe I love you, too."
His smile banished all sadness from his face, like a sudden wind that breaks apart the clouds. "Say it again." His hands reached out to touch her shoulders, her neck, her face. "One more time, with feeling."
"Will nof!" Laughing, she tried to break away from him, but he would not let go, and they fell in a tangle to the ground. "Beast!" They rolled over and over in the grass. "Brute!" She hammered at his chest, tore open his jumpsuit, tried to bite his neck.
Tory looked embarrassed, tried to pull away. "Hey, not out here! Somebody could be watching."
The agtechs switched off the arc lamps, plunging Magritte into darkness.
Tory reached up to touch Elin's face. They made love.
Physically it was no different from things she had done countless times before with lovers and friends and the occasional stranger. But she was committing herself in a way the old Elin would never have dared, letting Tory past her defenses, laying herself open to pain and hurt. Trusting him. He was a part of her now. And everything was transformed, made new and wonderful.
Until they were right at the brink of orgasm, the both of them, and half delirious, she could let herself go, murmuring, "I love you, love you, God I love you…" And just as she climaxed, Tory stiffened and threw his head back, and in a voice that was wrenched from the depths of passion, whispered, "Coral…"
Half blind with fury, Elin strode through a residential settlement. The huts glowed softly from the holotapes playing within—diffuse, scattered rainbow patterns unreadable out-side their fields of focus. She'd left Tory behind, bewildered, two terraces above.
Elin halted before one hut, stood indecisively. Finally, because she had to talk to somebody, she rapped on the lintel.
Father Landis stuck her head out the doorway, blinked sleepily. "Oh, it's you, Donnelly. What do you want?"
To her absolute horror, Elin broke into tears.
Landis emerged, zipping up her jumpsuit. She cuddled Elin in her arms, made soothing noises, listened to her story.
"Coral," Landis said. "Ahhhh. Suddenly everything falls into place."
"Well, I wish you'd tell me, then!" She tried to blink away the angry tears. Her face felt red and raw and ugly; the wet ware paint was all smeared.
"Patience, child." Landis sat down cross-legged beside the hut, patted the ground beside her. "Sit here and pretend that I'm your mommy, and I'll tell you a story."
"Hey, I didn't come here—"
"Who are you to criticize the latest techniques in spiritual nurturing, hey?" Landis chided gently. "Sit."
Elin did so. Landis put an arm about her shoulder.
"Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Coral—I forget her last name. Doesn't matter. Anyway, she was bright and emotional and ambitious and frivolous and just like you in every way." She rocked Elin gently as she spoke.
"Coral was a happy little girl, and she laughed and played, and one day she fell in love. Just like thatl" She snapped her fingers. "I imagine you know how she felt."
"This is kind of embarrassing."
"Hush. Well, she was very lucky, for as much as she loved him, he loved her a hundred times back, and for as much as he loved her, she loved him a thousand times back. And so it went. I think they overdid it a bit, but that's just my personal opinion.
"Now Coral lived in Magritte and worked as a wetware tech. She was an ambitious one, too—they're the worst kind. She came up with a scheme to reprogram people so they could live outside the programs that run them in their every day lives. Mind you, people are more than the sum of their programming, but what did she know about free will? She hadn't had any religious training, after all. So she and her boyfriend wrote up a proposal and applied for funding, and together they ran the new program through her skull. And when it was all done, she thought she was God. Only she wasn't Coral anymore—not so as you'd recognize her."
She paused to give Elin a hug. "Be strong, kid, here comes the rough part. Well, her boyfriend was brokenhearted. He didn't want to eat, and he didn't want to play with his friends. He was a real shit to work with. But then he got an idea.
"You see, anyone who works with experimental wetware has her personality permanently recorded in case there's an accident and it needs to be restored. And if that person dies or becomes God, the personality rights revert to IGF. They're sneaky like that.
"Well, Tory—did I mention his name was Tory?—thought to himself: What if somebody were to come here for a new personality? Happens about twice a year. Bound to get worse in the future. And Magritte is the only place this kind of work can be done. The personality bank is random-accessed by computer, so there'd be a chance of his getting Coral back, just as good as new. Only not a very good chance, because there's lots of garbage stuffed into the personality bank.
"And then he had a bad thought. But you mustn't blame him for it. He was working from a faulty set of moral precepts. Suppose, he thought, / rigged the computer so that instead of choosing randomly, it would give Coral's personality to the very first little girl who came along? And that was what he did." Landis lapsed into silence.
Elin wiped back a sniffle. "How does the story end?"
"I'm still waiting on that one."
"Oh." Elin pulled herself together and stood. Landis followed.
"Listen. Remember what I told you about being a puppy tripping over its paws? Well, you've just stubbed your toes and they hurt. But you'll get over it. People do."
"Today we make a Buddha," Tory said. Elin fixed him with a cold stare, said nothing; even though he was in green and red, immune. "This is a higher-level program, integrating all your mental functions and putting them under your conscious control. So it's especially important that you keep your hands to yourself, okay?"
"Rot in hell, you cancer."
"I beg your pardon?"
Elin did not respond, and after a puzzled silence Tory continued: ' 'I'm leaving your sensorium operative, so when I switch you over, I want you to pay attention to your surroundings. Okay?"
The second Trojan horse came on. Everything changed.
It wasn't a physical change, not one that could be seen with the eyes. It was more as if the names for everything had gone away. A knee-tall oak grew nearby, very much like the one she had crushed accidentally in New Detroit when she had lost her virginity many years ago. And it meant nothing to her. It was only wood growing out of the ground.
A mole poked its head out of its burrow, nose crinkling, pink eyes weak. It was just a small, biological machine. "Whooh," she said involuntarily. "This is awfully cold."
"Bother you?"
Elin studied him, and there was nothing there. Only a human being, as much an object as the oak, and no more. She felt nothing toward or against him. "No," she said.
"We're getting a good recording." The words meant nothing; they were clumsy, devoid of content.
In the grass around her, Elin saw a gray flickering, as if it were all subtly on fire. Logically
she knew the flickering was the firing of nerves in the rods and cones of her eyes, but emotionally it was something else: It was time. A gray fire that destroyed the world constantly, eating it away and remaking it again and again.
And it didn't matter.
A great calmness wrapped itself around Elin, an intelligent detachment, cold and impersonal. She found herself identifying with it, realizing that existence was simply not important. It was all things, objects.
She could not see Tory's back, was no longer willing to assume it even existed. She could look up and see the near side of the earth. The far side might well not exist, and if it didn't, well that didn't matter either.
She stripped away the world, ignored the externalities. / never realized how dependent I am on sensory input, she thought. And if you ignored it—there was the void. It had no shape or color or position, but it was what underlies the bright interplay of colors that was constantly being destroyed by the gray fires of time. She contemplated the raw stuff of existence.
"Please don't monkey around with your programming," Tory said.
The body was unimportant, too; it was only the focal point for her senses. Ignore them and you could ignore it. Elin could feel herself fading in the presence of the void. It had no material existence, no real being. But neither had the world she had always taken for granted—it was but an echo, a ghost, an image reflected in water.
It was like being a program in a machine and realizing it for the first time.
Landis's voice flooded her. "Donnelly, for God's sake, keep your fingers off the experiment!" The thing was, the underlying nothingness was real—if "real" had any meaning. If meaning had meaning. But beyond real and beyond meaning, there is what is. And she had found it.
"Donnelly, you're treading on dangerous ground. You've—" Landis's voice was a distraction, and she shut it off. Elin felt the desire to merge with what was; one simply had to stop the desire for it, she realized, and it was done.
But on this realization, horror collapsed upon her. Flames seared and burned and crisped, and there were snakes among them, great slimy things with disgusting mouths and needle-sharp fangs.
She recoiled in panic, and they were upon her. The flames were drawn up into her lungs, and hot maggots wallowed in her brain tissues. She fled through a mind that writhed in agony, turning things on and off.
Best Science Fiction of the Year 14 Page 33