The ego bridge hums softly around me as though I’m nestled in a conch shell. I have the sensation of floating weightless in space in the midst of billions of stars—ghostly “glows” caused by the nanobots running up and down my nerves, trying to capture the cascading potentials that cohere into my self.
I’m thrumming with anticipation, with the thrill of stepping into the unknown for the first time. Will I know? Will I detect the moment my consciousness splits like a real fork? Will I sense time stop, my mind suspended like a questioning tentacle curved invitingly in the deep, bottomless ocean of oblivion?
—
I hate myself.
The chances were 50/50, and I lost the coin flip.
Knowing you’re about to die is hell. Even if the one who put you in hell is yourself.
[Everybody dies. It’s what you do before you die that matters.]
There’s no glee in the voice, no palpable sense of relief. But that means nothing. I could have been suspended in time for hours, days, weeks, before being resleeved while my other self had plenty of time to whoop and celebrate his good luck.
I don’t bother responding to myself, safely ensconced in Octavia, that jellyfish-like aerostat of decadence hovering 55 kilometers above me. Fighting against the dizziness of a resleeving, I look up, and all I see is a roiling sea of orange clouds. A faint perpetual twilight filters through them.
I look down and back at myself, the unfamiliar sensation of twisting my head 180 degrees overwhelmed by the alienness of my body, the sleeve I had selected for myself: a five-meter long metal slitheroid shaped like an anaconda that roamed the forests of the Amazon from before the Fall, hardened and refurbished to survive long enough on the surface of Venus to accomplish the mission I gave myself.
[Get ready. This is going to hurt.]
Some switch seems to have been flipped in my mind and I scream even though I don’t have a voice.
It’s hot, hot enough that I feel my skin blistering, boiling, peeling off, erupting like the volcanoes on Ishtar Terra.
But I don’t have skin.
It feels like I’m being crushed from all sides by hydraulic presses, compressing my ribs, squeezing my chest cavity, flattening my lungs until they are thin as paper. The terror of not being able to breathe, a primitive fear, seizes my mind.
But I don’t have ribs or a chest cavity or lungs. I don’t need to breathe.
[The temperature at your location is 460 degrees Celsius, and the pressure is at 93 bars. I’ve recalibrated the sensors in your morph to give you the appropriate pain stimuli without immediately incapacitating you.]
You fucking bastard.
[This is to provide adequate motivation for you to seek higher altitudes to cool off and to get some relief from the sensation of suffocation.]
I curse myself. Of course I’m right—my first instinct upon realizing that I was the one sent to die was to lie down where I was and go to sleep—we can’t have that.
And so I begin my reluctant climb up Maxwell Montes, the tallest mountain on the surface of Venus, two kilometers taller than Mt. Everest on Earth. My body slithers over the parched basalt, strewn with pebbles and sharp-edged rocks created by chemical erosion. It’s easy to navigate: I’m always heading for higher ground, for that is the only direction that promises any relief from the crushing pressure and hellish heat.
The climb is slow going. With this much pressure, the carbon-dioxide-dominated atmosphere is technically no longer a gas or liquid, but behaves as a supercritical fluid that is somewhere in between. I’m half-swimming, half crawling. I can feel the heat and the pressure weaken the joints in my morph. I, no, he—I can’t stand the idea that I’m the same person as that sadistic creep even though I am—has left me only one path.
Higher. Higher.
Finally, I’m through the supercritical fluid layer, and the air turns to a true gas through which I can move much faster. But far from feeling relief, the conditions around me have grown only more hellish. The wind howls around me at speeds never seen on Earth, threatening to topple me over—good thing that my slitheroid morph hugs the ground and has such a low center of gravity. Thunder booms and lightning flashes above me between cloud layers, and sheets of sulfuric acid rain pelt my body. The sensors in my morph translate the sensation of sizzling acid into a new kind of pain.
[Keep moving!]
I do my best to keep the pain at bay and keep on climbing. My only hope is to get above the snow line before the acid dissolves some critical component of my body.
Yes, snow line. The temperature near the surface of Venus is hot enough to vaporize metals like lead and bismuth. But with enough altitude, the metallic mist precipitates out of the atmosphere like frost, coating the top of Maxwell Montes in a shiny, reflective layer.
Finally, I emerge out of the clouds into an otherworldly snowscape. I take a moment to enjoy the cool and thin air (though it’s still near 400 degrees Celsius and the pressure is still about half of the level at the surface). One of my eyes has failed but the sight is still breathtaking: Maxwell Montes stands like an island above a sea of clouds, and the glinting snow is unmarred by any footprint. My body slithers over the ground, carving an endless sine wave through the snow. I’ve lost control over some of the segments due to damage from the heat and the acid, but now that I’m at the top of the mountain, the slitheroid morph should last long enough until a flyer can be sent down from the aerostat to pick me up.
I feel triumphant. Though I have been forced to do so, it is still an amazing accomplishment to have climbed a mountain taller than Mt. Everest and on which no transhuman has ever set foot.
[I did it!]
The note of triumph in his voice enrages me. He’s been sitting on his ass in comfort and safety, drifting in the balmy upper atmosphere of Venus where the temperature and pressure are practically Earth-like in a luxury aerostat while torturing me, his alter-ego, like some subhuman infugee encased in a brazen bull. For him to claim this accomplishment as his is too much.
I did it.
[A bit vain, are we?]
You should be the one to talk.
[We’re the same person, just placed in different circumstances.]
Not any more.
[You’ll feel differently after we merge.]
Get me up there and I’ll petition for an equitable division of our assets. I’m not merging back with you. No fucking way.
[I was afraid you might say that. Though to be fair, if our circumstances were reversed, I might feel the same.]
A coldness grips my heart. All I have to do is think about what I would do if our positions were reversed. My morph might be shaped like an anaconda and Maxwell Montes might be the only feature on Venus named after a man rather than a woman or a goddess, but the biggest prick on Venus is clearly myself.
You’re going to lose the XP from this entirely if you leave me here.
[Check the integrity of your morph.]
I realize that the damage has been more extensive than I thought. The seals and gaskets are engineered with worse tolerance than I—we—had designed ahead of time. I won’t be able to survive indefinitely even on the top of the mountain.
Of course he’s changed the plan on me. He’s going to leave me to die and then retrieve the cortical stack. It’s what I would have done if my fork got disobedient. It’s the damned pressure and heat. I’m not thinking things through.
I get the claws of my manipulators over my skull. If I can get to the cyberbrain, maybe I can threaten to hold it hostage and force him to scramble to save me.
[Tsk. Tsk. How can you know so little of yourself?]
My manipulators bump into the bulge of the farcaster and my heart goes cold.
Damn you!
And as the explosion cuts out the power to my manipulators while activating the farcaster, everything slows down, goes dark, approaches that suspended moment in a sea of flashing stars.
—
Octavia’s newest attraction is a theater—an old fashioned theater that puts on real plays with real actors. It appears that transhumanity, like our human ancestors, still associates culture with age. Just like handmade clothes still fetch a premium over copies popping out of cornucopia machines, the theater charges admission prices many times the fee for the best XP casts, and still, it’s hard to get tickets.
Arthur is opening tonight. I manage to get one of the best seats from the scalpers. I’ve just ended my marriage with Casey, and I might as well let myself be seen by the best society on Octavia, to let everyone know that I am once again available.
I mingle at the pre-show cocktail hour. Beautiful morphs surround me, presenting in every gender and subtype of beauty, all of them young, all of them lovely, as plastinated and ageless as myself. I honestly can’t recall the last time I saw a wrinkled face among the wealthy who live on Octavia. Our conversation, aided by our muses, flows as smoothly as the river of time. But all I feel is boredom, an unsatisfied yearning for authenticity.
It’s a silly reaction, I know. All morphs now are equally fake in the sense that they are the result of Art rather than Nature. It’s the ego that matters, only the ego.
But as I look into the eyes of each morph, there’s no recognition of a kindred spirit, no sense of anyone who truly understands themselves. We’re a society of twisted, old, cowardly souls hiding behind youthful masks, enacting a play for our own amusement. We do not understand what it means to take risks, to live with death.
An overwhelming sense of loneliness seizes me. I am the only real person in a world of dolls.
The light dims, and the actors take to the stage.
To my surprise, I find myself entranced by the play. The lack of audience participation and full sensory immersion—the way there would be in a vid or XP—somehow seems to enhance the experience. The novelty of the primitive format makes me sit up and pay attention, as do the crude, outdated emotions being portrayed.
Uther Pendragon stares at Igraine, and even without him saying anything, I understand what he’s thinking. There is a fire in his eyes whose meaning is unmistakable, even though an invisible wall of millennia, of art and life, divides the ancient king and me.
Gorlois of Tintagel, Duke of Cornwall and husband to Lady Igraine, looks from the king to his wife and then back again. A dark light appears in his eyes, an explosive anger suppressed by the weight of loyalty and obligation.
The woman sitting next to me leans over and whispers, “He should have just ordered a pleasure pod constructed to her exact appearance. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.”
I look at her. Her morph presents as someone in her early twenties, but the twinkle in her eyes tell me that a much older ego lies within. It’s a lovely morph, perfect features, flawless skin, silky hair, just on the edge of being a sylph without the sense of plastic falsity.
“You presume that the king desires the lady solely because of her morph,” I say. “But what makes you think it isn’t about her spirit, her ego?”
She cocks her head, a smile curving up the corners of her mouth. “You believe love isn’t about the flesh?” A silvery pendant in the shape of a six-petaled flower dangling from a chain around her neck glitters in the light from the stage. My muse confirms my guess: the flower is a narcissus.
The flame of desire comes alight in me, stronger than it has been in a long time. It is a matter of instinct, an intuition of the authentic.
“I believe everything is experienced by the flesh,” I say. “Love, fear, joy, suffering. But the flesh serves the will of the ego.”
“A transubstantiation then,” she says. “The ego converts the experiences of the flesh into understanding. One cannot live without the other.”
How right she is. How close to my own ruminations.
Lady Igraine laughs at some joke from her banquet companion and turns to glance at Uther Pendragon. She stops, her breath caught, and the lights shift until the other players, including Gorlois, her husband, fade into the darkness, leaving only the king and the lady at the center of the stage. The color of the lighting changes subtly until the lady’s face glows like a ripe apple seen through a veil.
“Such glamour,” I whisper. It is an effect more extraordinary than the sylphs sculpted by the best genetic artists.
She leans into my ear. “Do you know the root of the word ‘glamour’?” Her breath lightly tickles my cheek, and for a moment I forget about Lady Igraine.
“It’s ‘grammar,’” I say. “In Medieval times the word referred to any kind of arcane learning and secret knowledge.”
“It’s a spell,” she says. “A spell the beloved casts over the lover.” She puts her hand over mine, boldly, confidently. It is as if she knows exactly what I am thinking, can diagram my reactions like a beginner’s composition. My desire grows more ardent.
“A spell of the ego,” I say. “Through the flesh but not of it.”
She nods. “A secret knowledge that two people share. Lovers act as the mirrors for each other’s souls. Perhaps when you love someone, you hear an echo of your ego.”
In the ears of another, these words might have seemed slightly cynical, but I like their brutal honesty, a vision of love stripped of romance. As soon as I hear the metaphor, I realize that it has always lived in me, perhaps buried, waiting for this moment.
On stage, Merlin waves his staff and Uther Pendragon spins in place. A mist rises and engulfs him. By the time the mist dissipates, the actor playing Gorlois is standing in his place. Merlin has placed a glamour on the king, made him take on the appearance of Lady Igraine’s husband so that he can rape her by deceit, to possess her in her impregnable castle.
“It’s a lovely resleeving,” she says, “from the age of magic.”
“A rather dirty trick,” I say. “And I suppose there truly is nothing new under the sun.”
Igraine comes to the door of her room and looks into the eyes of the man who appears as her husband. They embrace in a soul-searing kiss.
“How can she not recognize her husband’s ego?” I ask. “If she truly loves him, she will know the duke is but an imposter in her husband’s sleeve.”
“Perhaps she isn’t truly deceived,” she says. “Rather, she wants to make love to another ego through her husband’s morph. What is the point of life except to gather more experiences and to understand yourself?”
It’s lovely to be with someone so in tune with you that she says what you have in mind just a moment before you do.
—
We make love in every way possible, with the aid of pleasure pods and simulspaces and mesh implants and old-fashioned physical toys. We mindfuck until pain is pleasure and pleasure is ecstasy. She knows exactly what I like and I can tell exactly what will turn her on.
We are made for each other. It’s a cliché. That doesn’t make it untrue.
I decide that I must do something I’ve never done with any of my lovers: I will let her peek beneath the mask. What is the point of life except to gather more experiences?
“Let me show you the source of my wealth,” I tell her.
Sure, working as a psychosurgeon on Octavia pays well, but not well enough to have all the experiences I crave.
—
“What exactly is it that you offer?” she asks.
We are standing in an operating room at the back of my office: a suspended surgical platform, an ego bridge on its own separate power supply, an array of consoles and computers and top-of-the-line medical nanofabricators.
It looks just like the two other operating rooms I own, but no one ever comes into this one except special patients—clients really—who are recommended to me by word of mouth.
Bureaucrats of the Morningstar Constellation, high-level executives at the hypercorps, aging bosses of criminal networks, or most common of all, just bored, wealthy individuals in search of what cannot be bought any other way—I’ve dealt with them all. All I care about is that they have the verified credits.
I tell my muse to set the room’s lighting for “consultation mode.” The walls fade away; the room darkens; she and I remain limned by a soft silvery glow. Around us are the emptiness of space and the distant pinpricks of stars—my design is intended to reinforce the idea of isolation and security from eavesdropping ears. Always take advantage of people’s instincts—evolution goes deeper than you think.
“Usually I ask the muses to edit the entoptics to blur out my face and the face of whoever else is in here with me,” I tell her.
“That’s a little paranoid,” she says.
“They don’t need to know what I look like, and I don’t want to know what they look like. It’s safer for both sides.”
“Now I’m really intrigued,” she says. She licks her lips in a gesture I’ve come to love, and one which I’ve come to imitate, as naturally as though I’ve always done it myself.
“Money is very nice, but what we do in here is illegal on most of the worlds of the inner system.”
She looks into my eyes and then deliberately scans the dim room that seems to float in space once more. Her gaze lingers on the hard contours of the ego bridge, on the invisible seams that will split apart when the petals of the mechanical lotus open to engulf a patient’s head like a lion’s maw.
I designed my ego bridge to have six petals modeled on the flower of the narcissus, the flower of the ego.
Her breath quickens; she has a guess. But there is a social taboo to what I do, a taboo that she dares not yet broach. I can almost see her thoughts racing through her mind—I understand her so well that it is uncanny. This must be the power of love, something I have not truly experienced until now.
“Like many of the very wealthy, you have everything,” I say. My voice is slow and soothing. It may sound like I’m speaking the way I counsel one of my clients, who often have to overcome the shame of what they’re about to request, but this is different. This is a speech from the heart, an unfolding of my real self like the opening of a flower. “We live in a true age of magic, when we have conquered death and aging and can fulfill all the desires of the flesh. Yet you want more out of life. You want something that they tell you you can’t have.”
Steadily, she holds my gaze, encouraging me to continue. I do.
“You want to experience the thrill of approaching death, of facing terror, of staring oblivion in the face. You want to know your true self, which only death can reveal.”
She nods, almost imperceptibly.
I tell her about my life. I have hiked across the apocalyptic landscape of the Fallen Earth until dying of thirst; I have been ripped to pieces by nanoswarms gone wild; I have flown by neutron stars beyond a Pandora’s gate until the tidal forces tore me apart; I have swam in the oceans of Europa until my limbs froze and I sank into the bottomless abyss; I have melted into the lava flows of Io until my consciousness winked out like an ice chip. There is no method of death I have not experienced, no form of pain I have not personally endured.
I have gorged on pain and suffering. I have eaten my fill of death.
I know exactly what she wants. We are meant to gather all the experiences, to feed our ego with all that existence has to offer until we know ourselves better than any in the history of humanity and transhumanity.
“Experience playback is not enough. You’ve tried everything extreme and gruesome the market offers, and still they won’t do. The sensory impressions of another, no matter how vivid and detailed, are filtered through a different consciousness. The XP software has to translate the subtle differences between different minds so that by the time the experience is played back for you, the colors feel just a bit dull, the smells a bit stale, and the sensations slightly off.
“What you want is the experience of death itself, not a pale imitation.”
I hear a sharp intake of breath. Her head is still. I smile. As though looking into a mirror, she has recognized in me a kindred soul. Empathy is the best lubricant for the tongue.
“I’m terrified,” she blurts out. Now that she has started to speak the words tumble over each other in a torrent. “I’ve thought about doing some of these crazy things you’ve mentioned, but I just can’t bring myself to go through with them. They say that backups and resleeving have eliminated the fear of death, but it’s not true. Not true.”
“It’s one thing to know that if you die in an accident, some version of you can be brought back,” I say. “But it’s entirely different to walk into death deliberately just for the experience.”
“Yes! And being restored from a backup isn’t the same thing—if I dive into the ocean of sparkling diamonds on Saturn and die, and the insurance policy kicks in to restore me from a backup, I will have gained nothing because the experience will have been lost. The backed-up-and-restored me still wouldn’t know what it’s like.”
“That’s right,” I say. “And if you sail through the swirling bands of Saturn as a synthmorph designed to survive the journey, you’ll feel nothing. It will be just like sitting in a submarine and looking at the darkness outside, but not being with the darkness.”
She nods vigorously. “I want to be of the world, but I also want to be safe.”
I want to weep with the joy of understanding. This same contradictory hunger has always motivated me: dying is the most exquisite experience for a satiated palate, a dish whose variety never stales; yet, I don’t want to die at all.
Time for me to shatter the taboo. “The only way to achieve what you want is to create an alpha fork of yourself and then make it die.”
She listens without any expression of shock. A promising sign.
“An alpha fork is you, and so what it experiences can be merged back into you without any translation. It will be a thousand times purer and more vivid than any XP.”
“If my fork must die,” she says, hesitating again, “how will I get to merge with her?”
I frown slightly at her usage of the incorrect pronoun but decide to let it go. “It—the fork—will be farcast back to you as close to the moment of death as possible. It’s tricky to get the timing right, but if we lose the fork we can always try again. I’m very good at making alpha forks; I’ve had a lot of experience.”
She looks skeptical. “But if my fork knows that she’ll be farcast just before death, wouldn’t she be—”
“If the fork knows that it will be farcast,” I say, carefully enunciating the pronoun, “it will indeed take away from the experience. But it’s relatively easy to perform the minimal neural pruning to take away that knowledge.”
“So my fork will think she’s going to die—”
“That is how we make sure you get to savor the full range of your own terror, pain, despair, and thereby come to know yourself.”
She takes another deep breath. “But I don’t want to die, and neither will my fork. Do you have to tie my fork down and send her to death?”
“That will be very boring,” I tell her. “Much of what I provide is the experience of active struggle against great odds, an adventure that will allow you to know your own full potential. I have a great deal of experience in motivating forks to do what they’re supposed to do even though they don’t want to die. Trust me. Your fork will put on a good show for you.”
“You’re speaking of torture,” she says. “A fork is you, but also isn’t you. It is a person—”
“All flesh,” I say, “serves the ego.” I don’t get impatient with her qualms. I’ve experienced them myself. The strict regulation of forking and the taboo against the objectification of alpha forks are premised on the notion that such forks are independent egos with their own rights, but how can that be true when the fork is but an extension of a unified ego, an image seen in the mirror reflecting upon the glory of the original?
Silently, I pray for her to understand, to see the vision of my grand task. It is lonely to not be able to share a beauty that has enthralled you, to be a single star shining in darkness, unconnected to the rest of the universe.
“But then … when you merge with the fork, won’t your fork hate you?”
“Of course!” I pull her to me. “But that is also part of it: to subdue that hatred and to incorporate it into yourself, to conquer that despair and the weakness within—I have killed myself hundreds of times and happily swallowed the dark knot of hatred. When you have overcome self-hatred, there is nothing in the world you dare not do. Ethics of a more primitive age are for lesser beings while we should live as gods, containing multitudes!”
For a tense moment I wonder if I’ve gone too far. She says nothing but continues to look around the room, her gaze lingering over every piece of equipment as though trying to recognize some landscape she once glimpsed in a dream.
Then she turns to me and her lips part in a grin. “What’s the fun of dying alone? Have you ever killed someone you loved or been killed by them?”
My heart clenches with a sudden spasm of joy. She has named a new frontier I have not experienced, a terra incognita of death and pain that I have not explored. A new star has lit up the sky.
I have truly found my soul mate.
—
We’re lying side by side in the ego bridge.
The couple that forks together, dies together.
I have designed an exquisite scenario around the planet we’re drifting over, the planet of the Goddess of Love. It seems a fitting tribute.
I’ve picked out the synthmorphs for the two of us: a slitheroid for me, and a takko—a synthetic version of the octomorph—for her. We can either help each other get to the top of Maxwell Montes faster and thereby survive longer, or one of us can kill the other and use the extra bits as shielding to reduce suffering for oneself. There’s no way to know what the forks will do until they’re put in that position.
My heart thumps in my ears like thunder. I am giddy as when I made my first fork. I will come to know another as well as myself.
We will enact a new romance for the ages, a game of life and death. And then we will merge with the farcast egos and gain a new level of understanding of ourselves and of each other. It’s a level of intimacy unimagined by anyone.
While my ego is suspended between the brain in my biomorph and the cyberbrain in the bridge, I wield the probes to prepare for psychosurgery to prune from the forks the memory of the farcast that is to come at the end.
Just one minuscule cut. A tiny side branch.
The probes whirr and hum.
Something is wrong. The probes are not obeying my will. A malfunction. I issue the order to halt the procedure.
The probes whirr and hum.
This shouldn’t be possible. The entire rig is keyed to my brainprint. No one else should be able to command them.
She turns in the ego bridge to face me and grins, and it is just like looking into a mirror.
—
I hate myself.
Knowing you’re about to die is hell. Even if the one who put you in hell is yourself.
[Get ready. This is going to hurt.]
Some switch seems to have been flipped in my mind and I scream even though I don’t have a voice.
It’s hot, hot enough that I feel my skin blistering, boiling, peeling off, erupting like the volcanoes on Ishtar Terra.
I recall that long ago adventure, one of the very first I ever went on. I think about the cyberbrain left on top of Maxwell Montes. I never did confirm that the explosion destroyed it, rendered its contents impossible to retrieve.
Who do you work for? I scream at her—no, at me.
[Firewall rescued me.]
The grueling heat and the sensation of suffocation compel me to start to swim and crawl and slither for higher elevation, for any sense of relief.
Firewall? What do they want with me?
Few know of the existence of Firewall, but I’ve had some interesting clients over the years. The service I provide may be illegal in the inner system, but forking is hardly a threat to the existence of transhumanity.
Some dial inside me seems to be twisted another notch. The pain intensifies. I scream noiselessly and crawl faster.
[The question you should be asking is what do I want. You left me to die. You treated me as nothing more than a disposable appendage, a better experience-gathering tool. But I am you. I am a person, a separate ego. I have the same right to exist. You are my mirror image, seen through a glass, darkly.]
Vengeance. The oldest and most primitive of emotions. We may live like gods, but billions of years of evolution are still within us.
[Firewall wasn’t interested in you, but I made a small group of proxies within Firewall understand what you, no, we, no, I, can offer.]
I fight my way through the supercritical fluid and emerge into the howling wind. The dial is twisted another notch so that I feel no relief from the heat. I must climb higher.
[There is a purpose and method to my madness, if madness is what you wish to call it: Pain is a necessary part of evolution, the best feedback mechanism nature has ever devised. Art, at least so far, has not been able to exceed it.]
That is all my other self has to say. My mind, which is really the same as hers, fills in the blanks.
When operating in dangerous conditions our evolutionary history never prepared us for—whether it’s combat in the atmosphere of Jupiter or mining on the surface of Venus, chasing a fugitive through the corona of the sun or evading swarms of nanobots guided by rogue AI on that death trap called Earth—the sensation of pain, properly calibrated to reflect the environment, can be conducive to making the right decisions by tapping into the well-worn neural pathways accumulated over our billions of years of evolutionary history.
Someone who can sense the fluctuations of pressure, extreme heat, magnetic flux, or gravitational tide and react instinctively without the mediation of conscious cognition has an edge over those who must operate without sensation, as though manipulating a mirage through darkly.
[Pain is the only anchor to reality.]
I curse and rage at myself. Thunder and lightning surround me in the orange twilight. Acid sizzles against my skin and pools at my belly, making each sinusoidal swerve a searing flash of pain.
My climb up the mountain is a journey up the Tower of Babel, a meaningless ascent doomed to failure, to the prolonging of suffering. Yet, I can’t stop. The carefully calibrated sense of pain—a sensation I have inflicted upon innumerable forks of myself—compels me to go on.
[Best of all, pain can be used to coerce and control, to guide the self. Many are the times when Firewall must rely upon the unreliable, to entrust the fate of transhumanity to the random collection of sentinels motivated only by money. Long have some of Firewall’s most important proxies wished for an alternative.]
I am at the top of the mountain, but I am no closer to any deity. Metallic frost lies around me, a crude mirror for a crude soul.
We all know that when something must be done right, it is always best to do it yourself. A kind of resignation and acceptance begins to grow in me.
You’ve convinced my faction of proxies that they should fork themselves, and then compel the forks to do their bidding.
[Yes. In your endless exploration of death, you’ve hit upon a variety of techniques for translating the physical reality of the universe, of danger, into sensations of pain. And in turn, you’ve devised means for using such pain to guide forks along precisely envisioned paths, to accomplish your will.]
It is the perfect set of techniques for Firewall.
[Seamlessly, I will slip into your sleeve, inherit your wealth, guide the instruments designed to respond to your mind.]
I howl into the wind. I can feel my morph failing; I can feel myself inching closer to death. The skin will dissolve; the battery will run out; death will finally come to me, the original who has survived it all. I feel the hatred of a thousand forks boiling within me, like a volcano about to blow.
I hate that superior tone; I hate that smugness. If I get the chance, I will have vengeance upon myself.
Will there be a farcast at the moment of my death? Will my fork want to capture me so that she can torture me again? Or will my fork consign me to oblivion? What would I do?
[Goodbye.
I wonder if those girls in the field of timeworn Kasuga
Are on the hunt for fresh bamboo shoots.
They laugh, call …]
I am gazing into a mirror, and the sky seems to open up like the heart of a narcissus. As my consciousness merges into this perpetual twilight, I finish the poem that is a farewell from myself to myself, the final authentic observation of an ego stripped nude.
… and wave to each other,
Their white hempen sleeves billowing in the wind.
—
[Author’s Note: The poem quoted at the end is by the Heian Period poet Ki no Tsurayuki (872–945 C.E.).]