The job was three kinds of weird before it even began.
On a blistering July afternoon in 2019, I was in my office, leaning back in my custom-made chair, bare feet resting on my desk, trouser-legs hiked up far enough to expose two large and hairy calves. I’d angled my size-thirteens toward the portable fan, trying to get at least my lowest extremities comfortable.
Fat chance. The ancient fan had developed a death rattle and a case of the slows over these long days of the worst heat wave in Ohio’s recorded history, and the poor thing couldn’t even cool itself. Thena and I refused to buy a new one out of principle. Considering what we were paying for rent, we weren’t supposed to need a fan.
My partner, Athena Gregory, an oversized pixy with ideas as varied and strange as animals in the Columbus Zoo, had reluctantly admitted it was her turn and had just departed on a cold-brew replenishing mission. I was supposed to be doing paperwork, but instead I’d been leafing through a book of Zen koans until I stopped on this puzzler:
A monk asked Fuketsu: "Without speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?"
Someone accidentally offered a solution by knocking on the pebbled-glass insert of my office door. I jumped a bit because a warning buzzer is supposed to sound, here in what Thena calls the "inner sanctum," whenever our hallway door opens. It’d buzzed when she’d left, but perhaps it, like my deodorant, had finally succumbed to the heat.
"Come right in," I called out, shoving the book aside, getting my legs under the desk, and sitting up. I didn’t bother with peripherals such as shoes.
The odd couple shuffling into the room wasn’t my usual breed of clientele. They were seriously overdressed for the weather–hell, a thong would’ve been suffocating. Both were wearing knit sweaters. The man looked about eighty years old and was maybe six-one if he could manage to stand straight. His face was pinched and scholarly–assuming scholars spend their off-hours sucking lemons. His companion had elfin features like Thena, only this woman was far tinier and, from the wrinkles, a millennium older. One or both were wearing a heavy lilac perfume.
"James Q. Carlton?" the scholar asked. "The private detective?"
"Guilty as charged."
The man licked his lips, which were pale and cracked. "I hope it’s acceptable that we wandered in without calling ahead."
I waved my hand, granting permission for assorted peccadilloes. "Sorry about the sauna effect. The air-conditioner broke down a week ago and they promise to deliver a new one the instant we don’t need it."
"We don’t mind a little warmth, Mr. Carlton," he said, raising his voice to carry better over the fan. "I’m Dr. Raymond Fisk and here is my associate, Professor Dorothy Grahame."
I pushed back my chair and stood up to shake hands. My guests’ eyes widened as I rose. Their faces registered the dismay of homeowners observing a new volcano sprouting up on the front lawn. Being six-eight plus is mostly a damn nuisance. Their palms were amazingly dry.
"Pleased to meet you both." I tried not to sound like an imminent eruption. "How can I help you?"
Fisk looked over at Grahame, but her mouth had dropped open and her eyes were glazed. She’d noticed my immodest collection of American art glass and had lost interest in the normal world. Genuine Tiffany pieces can do that to you. You think you know what beauty is. . . .
Fisk gave up on her. "You were recommended to us by Superintendent Montgomery of the Chicago Police Department."
"How kind of him." But hardly surprising. Superintendent Montgomery happens to be my uncle Hugo, renowned for his ability to turn the briefest interaction with any media journalist into useful publicity. Hugo emits evening-news sound bites such as "I never trust a drunk or a gun when they’re loaded" with the ease of a duck emitting quacks.
Fisk’s mouth warped into something nearly a smile the way a piranha is nearly a goldfish. The disturbing expression only lasted an instant, but in the sweltering office I felt a chill touch on the back of my neck. He probably had a twinge of heartburn, I told myself.
"Dottie and I," he said, "are founding members of the ICRO, the International Cryptozoology Research Organization, currently headquartered in Chicago. Do you happen to know, sir, what cryptozoology involves?"
"I think so. Searching for species thought to be extinct, or species unknown to science. Hunting around for the nearest coelacanth and, say, King Kong."
He nodded but his lips turned south. "More or less. We have a task we’d like you to undertake for us."
Whatever they wanted, it wasn’t going to be our typical case. Thena and I mostly do insurance investigation, usually trying to discover if some heirloom declared stolen by its owner was, in fact, stolen. Amazing how often the missing treasure turns out to be wedged behind the credenza, or has been lifted by some relative or friend who’s been offered a slice of the settlement. . . .
I sat down, waving my new friends toward the second-hand, or at least second-rump, Aeron chairs near my desk. Fisk had to pull Grahame’s sleeve to drag her attention off an opal-glass vase.
"Tell me more," I said in my friendliest manner after everyone was seated. "As it happens, right now we’re free to consider a new project." As it happened, bills were due.
"Do you believe," Grahame said, "in ghosts, Mr. Carlton?" Her voice was improbably deep and rich.
I tried to keep my eyebrows from denting the ceiling. "I haven’t thought about it much, Professor. I guess you could call me an agnostic on the subject."
Her smile turned the furrows around her mouth into deep parentheses. For the first time, I noticed that her gray eyes, behind thick rimless glasses, were as probing as searchlights. And her face, beneath its fractal wrinkles, showed signs of long illness.
Now that I wasn’t lounging, sweat was pasting my shirt to my back. My clients apparently had no such problems; neither face wore the least sheen. Maybe they were ghosts themselves.
"What," I asked, "do ghosts have to do with cryptozoology? Wouldn’t . . . spectrology be more the right field?"
They glanced at each other. I got the impression they hadn’t been surprised by the question per se, but that a Neanderthal knew the word "spectrology."
Grahame leaned forward slightly. "That depends, young man, on what, precisely, a ghost is. Many reports of ‘ghosts’ involve such phenomena as cold spots and amorphous shapes. Why should such sightings have anything to do with deceased individuals?"
"Good point. But don’t tell me you’ve come all the way from Chicago to hire my firm to track down a ghost?"
"Hardly, Mr. Carlton. I’m afraid it’s unlikely that you are qualified for such work. Please don’t be offended."
I had to grin. "I’ll try to keep my spirits up. As it happens, they didn’t offer specter hunting where I went to school. And please call me Jimmy." A touch of informality helps ease tension, and people who come to a detective agency tend to be wound tighter than a golf ball.
"Unfortunately, the man we want you to investigate is also nicknamed Jimmy," said Grahame. "Which may make our discussions a bit confusing."
"I take it this fellow’s heart still beats?"
My visitors exchanged glances again. Fisk regained the floor by clearing his throat. "It isn’t the man we are concerned about primarily, but the rather remarkable claim he’s made."
"Go on."
"He claims to have trapped a ghost and is offering to sell it to the highest bidder."
That was an eye-blinker. "And my job would be?"
"To determine this individual’s trustworthiness. He’s starting the bidding at a high figure and we want to know if his character guarantees his guarantee."
I took a second to sort that one out. "He’s offered to return the money if the buyer isn’t satisfied?"
"Precisely."
"Fine. Give me his full name and address, if you have it, and I’ll–"
He’d raised his palm, traffic-cop style. "Mr. Carlton . . . Jimmy. We’ll expect more from you than pure research. We want you to accompany us back to Chicago and conduct your investigation from there." He glanced at his hand, seemed surprised at its elevation, and let it drop. "This should only take a few days. Not only will we want you to keep in close contact with us, we’d like you to observe the man in person. Superintendent Montgomery declared you a marvelous judge of people."
"Did he? I’ll have to run this past my partner, but I don’t think she’ll have any–" The buzzer rattled half-heartedly; apparently the vacation had done it some good, but not enough. "Hold on, that’s probably her now."
Thena opened the door gently; somehow, she always knows when a client’s in the office. Her fine hair was limp, red-blond strands plastering her lightly freckled forehead. She was a heat-drenched soggy mess, but compared to Fisk and Grahame, she looked impossibly young and pretty. She was carrying a paper bag almost Grahame’s size and, considering the way her arms were straining, somewhat heavier. I hurried over to assist.
"Good lord, Thena, did you buy the entire store?" I muttered.
"Only the liquids."
I stuck the bag on the refrigerator in a corner while performing amenities, introducing Thena by her full name. She shook hands, rolled her chair over from her sanctum desk, and sat quietly while I filled her in. She absorbed the notion of purchasing ghosts without a twitch.
"How are we getting to Chicago?" she asked. "It’ll take over four hours by car, assuming we swing toward Toledo and catch I-80 at–"
"That won’t be necessary, dear," Professor Grahame interrupted. We’ve a private jet parked at your local airfield, with a thoroughly expert pilot."
"Thoroughly expert" seemed an odd choice of words, unnecessarily reassuring.
Thena caught it too. She gave me a questioning look before glancing at her wristwatch. "Do I have time to go home and pack?"
I was seated next to Grahame on the brief flight to Midway Airport. Lounging back in my leather-covered seat, enjoying an abundance of legroom, sipping an iced raspberry soda with a splash of fresh lemon, I idly tracked our progress though the sky on a monitor mounted on the seatback in front of me. My one gripe was that the seat’s massage control was designed specifically for right-handers. Why are so many engineers prejudiced against my kind? On the screen, the icon representing our jet was bigger than Chicago and I hoped we weren’t going to crush the city when we landed. While I was enjoying myself, Grahame was busy prying into my life. I was too comfortable to protest.
"Your partner is exquisite," she said just loudly enough to be heard over the jet-roar. "So tall and beautiful. Are you two an item?"
I grinned, more at the term from Bringing Up Baby than at the idea of Thena and me as a couple. "No. She’s happily married to a good friend of mine. Besides, I’ve known her since pre-school; we don’t think of each other in romantic terms."
"I was so admiring all those vases and lamps in your office."
"Thank you. I admire them myself. Daily."
"One wouldn’t expect to find such things at a detective agency. Do they belong to you? That dragonfly lamp appeared to be genuine Favrile from the Tiffany studios."
Internally, I bought several more shares of Grahame, Inc. "You’ve got an eye, Professor! A few years back, I inherited some money and decided to invest it in art glass rather than stick it in the bank or into some mutual fund."
"How wise. I imagine the value has appreciated faster than any mutual fund."
"Definitely, but that’s not why I did it. My dad, who was one hell of an artist, taught me to love the stuff. And since Athena and I work for several insurance companies, we get a nice discount on our premiums."
"You sound like a shrewd young man. I’m delighted we found you. Ray and I are a bit beyond our depth here and we need all the shrewdness we can muster."
"We’ll do our best."
The temperature as we stepped from the plane was a shock. Apparently, the pleasure of camping out in a pizza oven hadn’t confined itself to Boon, Ohio.
Thena and I hadn’t had a chance to talk privately before the flight, but our hosts invited us to wait inside Midway’s air-conditioned terminal while they arranged with their pilot to get us home after the job was over.
We laid claim to two seats in the waiting area nearest the gate.
"What’s the story?" I asked.
"Assumptions, assumptions."
"One little suitcase."
She grinned. "You are a detective."
I’d better translate. I wanted to know what she found out about our clients after she went home, supposedly just to grab some clothes. She teased me, asking what made me assume she’d done such research. But I know my Athena. She’d usually pack more than this for a day trip.
She got serious. "The International Cryptozoology Research Organization exists. No website, but the word ‘Cryptozoology’ pulled up mega references and links. Our clients were listed as founders. Both published scads of papers years ago, but none for decades. Few of those papers seemed related to zoology."
"Oh?"
"Fisk is a wizard in biophysics and holds a bucket of patents. Grahame’s a world-class chipset designer and a patron of the arts, one of the modern breed."
"Modern breed?"
"Affluent people, usually middle-aged women, who write grant proposals rather than forking out their own money."
"Let’s hear it for grantsmanship! I’ve known plenty of artists who’d appreciate being better endowed. Speaking of which, Grahame was trying to peek under my hood on the way over. She wondered if we were an ‘item.’"
Thena’s smile made the Mona Lisa’s seem blatant. "Fisk was asking questions, too, but they were all about you. He was subtle like a crowbar."
"What’d he want to know?"
"Not anything you’d expect. He noticed those Japanese books of yours in the office and asked what else you were interested in."
"Really?"
"And he wondered how well you did in school."
"Wow. And no questions about you?"
"Only as a way of spotlighting you. He asked my opinion on how . . . intellectually flexible you are."
"What did you say?"
She looked at me sweetly and patted my hand. "That mental rigor mortis set in long ago. Under torture, I broke and admitted that you were a nut for antique glass, antique movies, and antique Zen when it comes with pretty illustrations. Here come our employers. Did you notice how dry their hands are?"
Our cryptozoologists seemed a bit scandalized when Thena and I insisted on sharing a double at the Sheridan. Once, on a seemingly harmless case, we’d gotten into some boiling water because we were sleeping in separate rooms. Since then, the rule was to constantly watch out for each other when in the field.
We set up shop in our new home, plugged our laptop into the hotel’s cable jack, and while Thena used the Internet to check out J. Potts, I made phone calls to the same end. We’d barely begun assembling information when it was time for us to meet the clients down in the lobby. They’d made an appointment with the ghost-seller and wanted us at hand. One peculiar fact we unearthed: James Earl Potts was the chief technician of a unique company: Live Forever.
At his insistence, we met Potts outdoors at the University of Chicago, near Cobb Gate. He wanted to look us over before conducting business; if he found the sight of us bearable, he was willing to receive a grand in cash as "earnest money."
Potts was a scarecrow with a constant tilt to starboard; maybe his right leg was short. He had large, watery brown eyes, tan shoulder-length hair–shaggy, but his forehead showed a hint of male pattern baldness. His arms and upper lip were so long that I suspected he might enjoy brachiating now and then.
He was waiting as we approached Cobb Gate’s fancy arch and he’d brought along an ally of his own: an ogre of a man introduced only as "Cal." Cal eyeballed me, mumbled something about the "Jolly Green Giant," and drifted to a position directly behind Potts, which visibly and audibly annoyed the entrepreneur.
"Christ, Cal. Go home if you don’t think you can back me up here."
"Whatever you say, Jimmy. But you’ll owe for the whole day. Maybe I’ll see you around sometime, Giant." Cal winked at Thena and eased off like a man on vacation.
Potts glared at the receding back and rotated the glare toward me. "You planning on causing trouble?"
"Me? Never."
"Fine. Near here’s a bar where we can talk. You all start walking east; keep going straight until I catch up. I want to make sure you four are the whole party and I want the big guy where I can see him."
If he was being this cautious, surely the ghost-bidding was starting very high.
The bar was a throwback: smoke-filled, which meant a nearly-impossible-to-get smoking license, and gaudy with neon signs whose rotating parts created the illusion of lights spiraling and beer bubbling. At Potts’s insistence, I tried the local microbrew but decided it had to be an acquired tasteless.
Fisk cleared his throat. "Mr. Potts, we would have dismissed your fantastic claim out of hand, except–"
"Except that I work for Live Forever, which gives me access to some very special equipment. Right?" His tone bothered me; he sounded like an actor rehearsing lines while trying to sound spontaneous. He glanced at Thena and scowled. "What’s your problem, lady?"
His irritation didn’t remove Thena’s micro-smile. "I just think it’s interesting that extreme wealth doesn’t block extreme gullibility."
It was Potts’s turn to smirk. "So you figure Live Forever is a scam?"
Live Forever promised to provide immortality through digitally storing a person’s complete personality and memories.
"It’s an old idea," she remarked, "but a stupid one. Even a perfect electronic copy of someone isn’t the person."
"Tell you what. I’ll let you try it out and you’ll change your mind."
Thena looked surprised, which on her meant one eyebrow had lifted a sixteenth of an inch. "I thought you had to be near death for the process to work."
"Typical misconception, lady. If you’re young and healthy, I can move you into e-heaven and right back again no sweat. In fact, I’m going to have to send someone in there to prove I’ve got the ghost. You volunteering?"
My partner shook her head faintly.
Potts shot me a grin. "Looks like we’ll have to go with Jolly Green." He turned his gaze toward Fisk. "One thing I can’t figure: I told a buddy of mine to pass the word to a few specific . . . collectors he knows. The IRCO wasn’t on his list. How did you find out about my proposition?"
Fisk shrugged. "A claim such as yours spreads, sir."
Grahame tapped on the tabletop. "Why do you believe that the entity you’ve captured is a ghost?"
The technician inhaled a long drink of overpriced beer before answering. "You understand how uploading works?"
"Not the specifics," she admitted.
"We use MRI and MIS to form a complete model of the subject’s brain and its behavior. Then we–"
I’d raised a finger. "I know what MRI is, but what’s MIS?"
A sneer didn’t enhance Potts’s beauty. "Magnetic Inductive Stimulation. We use it to test impedances between individual nerve cells, map proprioceptive connections, chart the most often used–"
"I get the general idea."
"Yeah, right. Basically, we wind up with a program. One mother of a complex application. If we install and run it on our system while the modeled wet brain is functioning, the program repeats an elaborate but identical cycle. But if we use MIS to interfere with the wet brain’s higher functions, the program instantly develops variations and classic brainwave patterns. Subjectively, the subject wakes up inside e-heaven. We’ve learned that identity is largely a matter of habit."
I frowned. My opinion of Potts needed tweaking. "You know this from personal experience?"
"I’ve gone back and forth three times. One moment, you’re in your body. Next moment, you’re . . . I can’t describe it. Martin Trobbani, my boss, says that we’ve learned how to give the soul an IP address."
"All very interesting," Grahame broke in, "but you still haven’t answered my question."
"First, just a few more facts: we needed a way to test hierarchy protocols without the risk of overwriting a patron and getting sued by the relatives. So we set up several emulated minds and left them running. These models behaved predictably until three weeks ago."
"What changed?" Fisk asked.
"One of our wooden puppets began making brainwaves like a real boy."
Thena and I traded uncertain looks.
Fisk pursed his lips. "Perhaps you’ve created the first genuine artificial intelligence."
Potts tapped his own forehead. "My thought exactly. But when I asked the patrons, they told me different. Believe me, they know the score. And so will you after your big boy goes inside."
I had mixed feelings about this idea, all bad.
Live Forever, hogging an entire floor of the new Hartley Building, reminded me of a bank. Polished brown marble floors and it even had a vault: a massive airlock blocking out dust and outside noise. To my distress, Fisk and Grahame had offered me a cash bonus for mental guinea pig work, so huge that I couldn’t justify turning it down. And despite myself, Potts had spoken so glowingly about e-heaven, my overactive curiosity had woken up and demanded to be fed.
Which is why, after much external and internal arguing, I found myself naked, lying on my back on a cold plastic table, festooned with electrodes, waiting for God knows what to happen to me.
I didn’t have long to wait.
My skull resonated with a basso humming as white auroras filled my head. My sense of direction evaporated. Then, the strangest feeling arose as if I were standing up and someone or something huge and powerful was standing right behind me. I couldn’t turn to look. I . . .
SSchaSScha! TaTaTaTaTaTa! ZZahZZah!
Fireflies blazing in rainbow buzzes. Smoke, ouroboros, swallowing its own tail. Lemon smell and lemon-coated fear. The noise sweats and shivers. Grapefruit bitterness trickles through my eyes, turning to abysmal sweetness in my throat. My tongue is heavy sugar, radioactive. The world is a loom for salted cobwebs, airy and too loud. Is that a wall? I try to grab on to it. It collapses into paper-thin tissue in my . . . do I have hands? I try to scream and what pours from my mouth is cotton candy, spun meaning, already deflating . . .
Keep very still, sonny. Try to relax.
"Who said that?" How the hell can I hear such a soft voice in such a racket?
Welcome to the pseudoverse. You aren’t alone.
"Where am I? What’s wrong with me? Is this supposed to be e-heaven?"
A second voice chuckles:
Right now, it must seem like fair dinkum e-hell, eh?
A third voice, high and wispy: let there be light!
A spark, a flash, a torrent of brightness. I weep twin suns. . . .
Second voice: Steady, cobber. If you can see now, focus on a single spot. Trust us, we’ve all been through the same wringer.
The heavy Australian accent coming from a disembodied and directionless voice wasn’t exactly a sign of returning normality, but I picked a point of pickled random. "Okay. Uh, I’m focusing."
High voice: Describe what you see.
"Five dots, I guess. They’re close together and two of them have little . . . rivers attached. I can’t tell what’s flowing exactly, but one stream is, um, hot gold, the other is a cold green. Hey! The streams just traded colors!"
Second voice: Good job. You’re taking a gander at a simple switch; possibly a light switch and that’s the good oil, mate. Follow the gold river backwards. Don’t worry when it reverses hue–alternating current should bloody well alternate–just stick with the same river and she’ll be apples. Give us a travelogue along the way.
As I described the eccentric scenery, my invisible guides interpreted my sensations with some quibbling among themselves; apparently experience here was somewhat individualized. Before long, I was spotting junction boxes, serial ports, VLSIs and a slew of related objects on my own. When the guides figured out precisely where my awareness was centered within the enormous circuit I seemed to be traversing, they began issuing directions.
First voice: Take the top river on the left now; stick with it until you reach the second potentiometer.
"I’m there."
Take the thinnest river now, that’s the "wiper."
Finally, after dozens of instructions, I arrived at a new kind of device. "What’s this?"
Rather than answering directly, the Aussie voice suggested I put myself inside the stream of golden light and let it flow through me. Nervously, I obeyed. I still had no sense of what kind of "body" I was moving around in, or how I was moving it.
All I saw for a long time was dazzle with a sandy texture. Then, in one startling instant, my mind imposed order to the bright chaos and I found myself staring at something familiar: Thena’s white-zinfandel hair.
"You guys led me to one of the room cameras!"
High voice:
you’re a quick study, friend.
Quick? It must’ve taken me fifteen minutes to figure it out! Then I noticed something strange: Thena seemed to be frozen. Instinctively I tried to rush forward, which only shrank my field of vision. So I stepped back, as it were, until I could see more of the room. Potts, my partner, and the clients were crowded around a body lying on a table and nobody was moving.
"This camera’s acting as a web cam," I announced. "I seem to be looking at a single frame."
Anechoic laughter.
Second voice: You got that wrong, mate. Time flow here is bloody subjective, and you can diddle with it once you find your private speed-knob.
I stared harder, trying to infuse motion into the scene by sheer will, and was startled when some of Potts’s split ends began drifting. The next few moments were crazy as everyone in the room jerked around in fast-forward and then refroze in new and unbalanced positions. Gritting imaginary teeth, I kept trying to make my personal seconds and the outside world’s match, which proved frustrating as hell and reminded me of the first time I tried to deliberately wiggle my ears.
Still, I was making progress when I noticed something that scared the ectoplasmic crap out of me. Potts’s head had moved aside enough for me to confirm that the big fellow on the table was me. What put the icing on my nightmare was that my corpse began twitching.
I had my all-time worst thought: one of Live Forever’s customers had escaped and was taking over my body, and I was going to be stuck here forever. . . .
First voice: When you think that loudly in here, sonny, you might as well be shouting. But you’re wrong on all counts. Your flesh isn’t moving without you. The young lady was raising hell and Potts is channeling some of your virtual nerve impulses back into your meat to prove that it’s still alive.
"Hold on! You can hear what they’re saying out there? How is that possible when they’re barely moving?"
Chuckle. Then: Live Forever wouldn’t have gotten off the ground, without two-way communication between their uploads and the outside world. Hang around long enough you’ll master the art yourself. The tricky part is learning to work different time rates concurrently.
"Sounds tricky, all right. But thanks for easing my mind! What else am I wrong about?"
Your attitude. You were spooked at the idea of being trapped, but you can’t imagine the life you can make for yourself here. You wouldn’t believe the range of possible experiences.
"Such as?" One thing about being separated from one’s glands: you don’t get stuck in any particular emotion. I’d gone almost instantly from freaking out to calm curiosity.
Can you see me yet?
"No. Should I be able to?"
Try to imagine . . . a green ball in front of you.
I tried. "Nothing yet."
The ball is spinning and glowing.
"I see it!" As my belief strengthened, the green brightened a bit. The nearly transparent sphere had a faint lime-peel surface texture and contained a small blue blob suggesting a cell’s nucleus. "Is that you?"
It’s how you’re seeing me right now. A little suggestion lights the way here. Follow me.
The ball zoomed off and I zoomed right behind. We moved through a gate of some sort, zipped briefly along a silver stream, and then stopped within a complex bundle of devices. From the patterns, I recognized a camera and various electronics, but most of it was unfamiliar.
"I’m guessing you want me to stand in the golden light?"
Yes.
I could see what the new camera was seeing almost immediately, I just didn’t believe it. "Is that the Earth I’m looking at? Where the hell are we?"
Free minds such as ours, my friend, can fling perception wherever the Internet goes.
"Anywhere?"
Right now, we’ve placed our awareness in the Circumluna Space Platform. We travel in "shakes," not miles, and arrive without moving. In my personal world, we flew here
.
I kept staring at the Earth. "What’s a ‘personal world’?"
After you master e-heaven skills, you can couch your sensations in whatever form pleases you. As far as my individual experience is concerned, I live in the penthouse of a crystal castle ten miles tall, and most gods would envy my powers. Exhilarating, I assure you!
"You mean . . . we’re in The Matrix?"
As in the movies? Hardly. Objective reality, if you can call it that, remains. It’s merely tailored to fit our personal whims. You see that red cable near you?
"You mean the violet one?"
A trivial distinction. In my world, that red pattern is emblazoned on a heraldic shield to show that it’s a shielded cable, but we both recognize it as a cable. Now, I brought you here to experience something specific. Look for a junction where the camera’s gold data blends with two other colors.
"Okay, I’ve spotted it."
Go there and let the combined colors flow through you. Tell me what you experience.
At first the image was too bizarre to sort out. Even when it finally sprang into focus, I was confused.
"Well, I see the Earth again, in hyper-Technicolor for sure, and the sun and a heap of stars. But the world is surrounded by flowing patterns of some kind of . . . fog, somewhat squished on the dayside, streaming far into space on the night-side. Almost as if the whole planet is a partly submerged submarine, leaving one hell of a wake. Geometrical. Pretty, too."
Excellent! You’re a natural! The image is so colorful because you’re already integrating infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths from specialized recorders. Of course, you automatically transpose the colors to those you’re familiar with.
"And the fog?"
Magnetic fields. Your "wake" is Earth’s "magnetotail," shielded from the solar wind. Do you begin to see why I would feel suffocated with merely human senses? There’s much more, but your time here may end at any moment. I propose we return to home base, essentially a matter of shifting perspectives, and introduce you to the reason Potts put you here.
"Damn!" I said, shadowing the green sphere as it retraced our path. "This has been so amazing that I forgot why I came! Do you really have some kind of specter hanging out?"
Ah. Something arrived fairly recently.
"Not a ghost?"
You can decide for yourself.
We passed though the site of the laboratory camera and I positioned myself to snatch a peek inside the lab–everyone had changed position. Then I had to hurry to catch up to my guide, who finally stopped at a major junction point amid a dense forest of massive chips.
Suddenly, we weren’t alone. Past the green sphere, I noticed a red pyramid, a tubular orange infinity sign, also something resembling a yellow hex-nut. Every shape was translucent and each had its own subtle blue nucleus.
"Maybe it’s time for introductions," I said. "I’m James Carlton. Not, I trust, the late James Carlton."
Green ball:
We know who you are. Intent is palpable here, so we’ll always know whom you’re addressing, but for those who feel more comfortable with names, I go by Galahad.
High voice, the infinity sign: Gwennyth Overlake. Call me Gwen.
Second voice, the pyramid: Wally Jones–from the land up over by my globe.
A new basso voice associated with the nut spoke: Muriel Waters here.
"Nice to meet you all. How many of you patrons, uh, live here?"
Galahad: Thirty-nine, so far. Not including you, of course, since you’re only visiting.
"Okay. Could someone lead me to the ghost, or whatever it is?"
Gwen: Unnecessary. From this bus we can track everyone in the circuit. Your ghost is on its way here.
Before I could absorb this interesting news, something utterly bizarre pushed its way between the ball and pyramid.
I felt cool plastic beneath my body and opened my eyes to find Thena staring down at me. Potts and the clients were also watching but they weren’t leaning over, or fighting back tears.
"How do you feel?" my partner murmured.
"Wha’ happened?" My voice was slurred.
She glanced at Potts then grabbed one of my hands and squeezed. "I was about to ask the same question."
"I don’t know, Thena! A few seconds ago, I was talking with these . . . personalities in the weirdest place you can imagine. Then this thing appeared and before I could get a good look, I was back here."
As my partner straightened up, I caught the expression on Grahame’s face. Satisfaction? Triumph? I think she noticed my stare because her features hurriedly smoothed into an attitude of mild concern. What was going on here?
Potts’s smile seemed forced. "From the sound of things, you learned enough to back up my assertions."
"I’m not sure," I admitted. "Look, I’m a bit woozy, maybe we could sort this out later?"
Fisk patted my head the way I’d pat a favorite dog. "You should rest. Will you give us a few days, Mr. Potts, to reach a decision before you explore other options?"
"Two days. After that, I’ll take bids from anyone."
Leaning a bit on Thena and Potts, I stood up and waited for a new wave of dizziness to ebb. While I got dressed, the clients arranged a ride to the hotel for us hired helpers. They planned to stay behind to discuss "details" with the entrepreneur. Getting down to the haggling, perhaps.
Before our taxi taxied off, however, Grahame knocked on my window. I rolled it down and she leaned in; lilac perfume filled the cab but I got a whiff of something less sweet underneath. "If you feel well enough tomorrow," she said, "continue your investigation of Mr. Potts."
Thena leaned across me to face the older woman. "If we give him thumbs-up, how do you plan on carrying off your purchase?"
"That isn’t your concern, dear; but once he supplies the proper software, we can transfer our ‘purchase’ to any sufficiently large data system. Driver, you may leave now."
During the ride, I tried to describe my experiences among the non-angels of e-heaven but gave up when everything I said seemed to give the wrong impression. The hotel bed felt incredibly soft when I lay down. I really was a bit woozy.
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