Neil had gone over to the apple culture labs. I was pottering on a CityNet — the City still hasn’t Proclaimed me again, so I’m free to use their Net, though they have forbidden the procedure that created me.
I wasn’t Engineering. I think the utopia’s beach is the last Virtual project I will ever do. I have become interested in medicine now, though not in practising it, and in human evolution. I’m learning what I can, and thinking more. What will come of it? Well, ask me in fifty years.
And suddenly, without a sign or comsig, there was Michael, the old Michael, grinning at me — yes, you can grin in MindLink — in the total and complete Link that we’d had before.
It had been weeks since I’d heard from him. ‘What ——’ I began, and MindHeard him laughing.
‘Surprised?’
‘What? How?’ (Think of this happening in a nanosecond, or less.) ‘You had the operation!’
‘No. I told you, the City wouldn’t wear it. And I am the City.’
‘You are …’ Somehow I knew he meant more than that he loved it. ‘Michael, what have you done?’
‘Got rid of my body. Put my brain in stasis. I’m permanently Linked to the CityNet now.’ He laughed again, a laugh of glorious power and freedom. ‘No other Administrator can touch me, Dan. I’m legal, powerful and I’ll go on and on.’
A brain in stasis doesn’t age; not as bodies age, even with regeneration. Michael would be ruling the City when I was dead — by then he would be an institution. No-one would know as much, control as much, and what he decided would be law.
So we talk now and then. Talk? Exchange ideas and data with a flow and rate that no-one else could comprehend. And no, I haven’t told Neil that either — only what Michael did, what he is now. Neil and I are Realife and Michael is something else. A friendship that is purely mental, with — on my part at least — almost every memory of our old physical closeness gone.
I sometimes wonder though if we would be as close mentally if we hadn’t once trusted each other physically too.
As I said, no ending there. Not for a long, long time. Long after I am gone, my ideas will linger in their effect on Michael’s mind …