We jacked, straight across. I’d never done it before. If you’d asked me why, I would have told you that I was an editor and that it wasn’t professional. The truth would be something more like this. In the trade, the legitimate trade I’ve never done porno we call the raw product dry dreams. Dry dreams are neural output from levels of consciousness that most people can only access in sleep. But artists, the kind I work with at the Autonomic Pilot, are able to break the surface tension, dive down deep, down and out, out into Jung’s sea, and bring back well, dreams. Keep it simple. I guess some artists have always done that, in whatever medium, but neuroelectronics lets us access the experience, and the net gets it all out on the wire, so we can package it, sell it, watch how it moves in the market. Well, the more things change . . . That’s something my father liked to say. Ordinarily I get the raw material in a studio situa- tion, filtered through several million dollars’ worth of baffles, and I don’t even have to see the artist. The stuff we get out to the consumer, you see, has been struc- tured, balanced, turned into art. There are still people naive enough to assume that they’ll actually enjoy jack- ing straight across with someone they love. I think most teenagers try it, once. Certainly it’s easy enough to do; Radio Shack will sell you the box and the trodes and the cables. But me, I’d never done it. And now that I think about it, I’m not so sure I can explain why. Or that I even want to try. I do know why I did it with Lise, sat down beside her on my Mexican futon and snapped the optic lead into the socket on the spine, the smooth dorsal ridge, of the exoskeleton. It was high up, at the base of her neck, hidden by her dark hair. Because she claimed she was an artist, and because I knew that we were engaged, somehow, in total com- bat, and I was not going to lose. That may not make sense to you, but then you never knew her, or know her through Kings of Sleep, which isn’t the same at all. You never felt that hunger she had, which was pared down to a dry need, hideous in its singleness of purpose. People who know exactly what they want have always fright- ened me, and Lise had known what she wanted for a long time, and wanted nothing else at all. And I was scared, then, of admitting to myself that I was scared, and I’d seen enough strangers’ dreams, in the mixing room at the Autonomic Pilot, to know that most peo- ple’s inner monsters are foolish things, ludicrous in the calm light of one’s own consciousness. And I was still drunk. I put the trodes on and reached for the stud on the fast-wipe. I’d shut down its studio functions, tempo- rarily converting eighty thousand dollars’ worth of Japanese electronics to the equivalent of one of those little Radio Shack boxes. “Hit it,” I said, and touched the switch. Words. Words cannot. Or, maybe, just barely, if I even knew how to begin to describe it, what came up out of her, what she did… There’s a segment on Kings of Sleep; it’s like you’re on a motorcycle at midnight, no lights but somehow you don’t need them, blasting out along a cliff-high stretch of coast highway, so fast that you hang there in a cone of silence, the bike’s thunder lost behind you. Everything, lost behind you. . . . It’s just a blink, on Kings, but it’s one of the thousand things you remember, go back to, incorporate into your own vocabulary of feelings. Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, right there, razor’s edge, forever. What I got was the big-daddy version of that, raw rush, the king hell killer uncut real thing, exploding eight ways from Sunday into a void that stank of pov- erty and lovelessness and obscurity. And that was Lise’s ambition, that rush, seen from the inside. It probably took all of four seconds. And, course, she’d won. I took the trodes off and stared at the wall, eyes wet, the framed posters swimming. I couldn’t look at her. I heard her disconnect the optic lead. I heard the exoskeleton creak as it hoisted her up from the futon. Heard it tick demurely as it hauled her into the kitchen for a glass of water. Then I started to cry.