And here is Nils. Even without image or name, I would know that laughter. We are good friends, we have sometimes been lovers. Did you truly never want to be more than that, Nils? Do immortality and invulnerability breed fear of permanence?
You belong to an age that is dead, my dear. You must free yourself of it. We will aid you.
How is it I feel cold, here where space is a fiction and time an inconstant? No, this is not really you, Nils. I haven’t sensed your thoughts before, but surely they would not float free of all feeling tike these.
You are right. I am not in the network. This is my double, the downloaded configuration of my mind. Whenever I rejoin it, I grow the richer by what it has known while I was away. (Increasingly I have found you dull and shallow. I had not the heart to tell you so, then, but now there is no more hiding-)
By his emotion I know that Faunus—glands, nerves, tb’e whole animal heritage—is physically linked like me. Be of good cheer, Flora. You have boundless choices. Evolve with us.
Another mind comes to the forefront of me. It too is bodiless, but forever. A certain kindliness glows yet (because memories of loss and sorrow do, no longer felt yet still, in shadow fashion, understood?) to make it bid me Behold.
He was a physicist who dreamed of discoveries. Already the unification had been achieved, the grand equation written. Defiant, he.cherished his hopes. He knew full well how unlikely it was that any law remained unknown, that any experiment would ever again give a result for which the synthesis could not account. Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible, though. And if he never stumbled on some basic new phenomenon, the interplay of the quanta must keep casting forth surprises for him to quest through.
The computer system perfected itself. Nothing he had found with his subtlest and most powerful instrumentation was beyond its analysis. Everything he might find in his laboratories, it could predict beforehand, in ultimate detail. His science had reached the end of its search.
Idle hedonism repelled him. He set a device to shut down his body while it programmed the patterns that were bis mind into the system.
Are you happy?
Your question is meaningless. I am occupied. I participate in operations, I am one with the accomplishments. Time is mine to do with as I will. For it may take an hour to plan Earth’s weathers a year ahead, with the measures necessary to contain chaos; it may take a day to design an extension of the Web or compute the fate of a galaxy ten billion light-years hence on which it has accumulated sufficient data; but each bit of information processed is an event, and to me those hours are as a million years or more. Afterward I may descend to the pace of human thought and learn what went on while I was transfigured. On this I meditate. It is small but interesting. Grow into augmentation, Flora, and at last you will share splendor, promises the shade.
From Phyllis I understand that few desire such a destiny. They will stay organic, however mutable. Linkage is pleasure, enlightenment, challenge. Joined, we realize what we cannot realize singly, about each other and about the cosmos. We bring our revelations back and refashion them in our separate ways. New arts, skills, philosophies, joys, newnesses for which no old name exists, spring into being. Thus “do we enlarge and fulfill ourselves.
Come. Try. Surrender what you are to find what you are.
I merge into Phyllis, Faunus, phantom Nils. We are a self that never was before. I am slave who won to freedom, teacher and sportswoman, photosculptor and sybarite, dilettante mathematician and serious athlete. We will need many unions to ease the conflicts and create a single creature—
A whirl, a wheeling, a measure in the dance. Others have been with us. I withdraw and merge again. I am servant who won to a sort of queenship, gilled inhabitant of the sea, professional imaginer, artificial personality designed by the whole in conjunction with the computer—They fly together, they lose themselves, the hive mind Mazes and thunders—