At first he tried to convince himself that what he had seen had been a hallucination. But he did not believe that.
He flexed his fingers. They appeared unhurt.
He looked out at the storm-swept day. The windshield wipers were not switched on. Rain rippled down the glass, distorting the world beyond; everything out there looked twisted, mutated, strange. There could never be order, sanity, and peace in such a place as that.
Tentatively he touched the computer screen once more. It felt solid.
Again, he thought of how desirable the clean, predictable world of the computer would be—and as before his hand slipped through the glass, up to the wrist this time. The screen had opened around him and sealed tight to him, as if it were an organic membrane. The data continued to blaze on the tube, the Words and numbers forming lines around his intruding hand.
His heart was racing. He was afraid but also excited.
He tried to wiggle his fingers in that mysterious, inner warmth. He could not feel them. He began to think they had dissolved or been cut off, and that when he withdrew his hand from the machine, the stump of his wrist would spout blood.
He withdrew it anyway.
His hand was whole.
But it was not quite a hand any more. The flesh on the upper sides from the tips of his fingernails to his wrist, appeared to be veined with copper and threads of glass. In those glass filaments beat a steady and luminous pulse.
He turned his hand over. The undersides of his fingers and his palm resembled the surface of a cathode-ray tube. Data burned there, green letters on a background glassy and dark. When he compared the words and numbers on his hand to those on the car’s VDT, he saw they were identical. The information on the VDT changed; simultaneously, so did that on his hand.
Abruptly, he understood that regression into bestial form was not the only avenue of escape open to him, that he could enter, into the world of electronic thought and magnetic memory, of knowledge without fleshly desire, of awareness without feeling. This was not an insight strictly—or even primarily—intellectual in nature. It wasn’t just instinctive understanding, either. On some level more profound than either intellect or instinct, he knew that he could remake himself more thoroughly than even Shaddack had remade him.
He lowered his hand from the tilted computer screen to the data-processing unit in the console between the seats. As easily as he had penetrated the glass, he let his hand slide through the keyboard and cover plate, into the guts of the machine.
He was like a ghost, able to pass through walls, ectoplasmic.
A coldness crept up his arm.
The data on the screen were replaced by cryptic patterns of light.
He leaned back in his seat.
The coldness had reached his shoulder. It flowed into his neck.
He sighed.
He felt something happening to his eyes. He wasn’t sure what. He could have looked at the rearview mirror. He didn’t care. He decided to close his eyes and let them become whatever, was necessary as part of this second and more complete conversion.
This altered state was infinitely more appealing than that of the regressive. Irresistible.
The coldness was in his face now. His mouth was numb.
Something also was happening inside his head. He was becoming as aware of the inner geography of his brain circuits and synapses as he was of the exterior world. His body was not as much a part of him as it had once been; he sensed less through it, as if his nerves had been mostly abraded away; he could not tell if it was warm or chilly in the car unless he concentrated on accumulating that data. His body was just a machine after all, and a rack for sensors, designed to protect and serve the inner him, the calculating mind.
The coldness was inside his skull.
It felt like scores, then hundreds, then thousands of ice-cold spiders scurrying over the surface of his brain, burrowing into it.
Suddenly he remembered that Dorothy had found Oz to be a living nightmare and ultimately had wanted desperately to find her way back to Kansas. Alice, too, had found madness and terror down the rabbit hole, beyond the looking-glass… .