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He would have expected a routine beauty, bred out of cheap elective surgery and the relentless Darwinism of fashion, an archetype cooked down from the major media faces of the previous five years.
Aspects of my wealth have become autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities.
I should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh. Not in the past, if you understand me. I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers.
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
Eyes open, he pulled the thing from his socket and held it, his palm slick with sweat. It was like waking from a nightmare. Not a screamer, where impacted fears took on simple, terrible shapes, but the sort of dream, infinitely more disturbing, where everything is perfectly and horribly normal, and where everything is utterly wrong . . .
He was probably in his forties, but it was hard to say. He seemed to be of no particular race, or, in certain lights, to belong to some race that nobody else belonged to.
But the stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt he’d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn’t one of them, so he didn’t.
Andrea maintained that men like Alain lied so constantly, so passionately, that some basic distinction had been lost. They were artists in their own right, Andrea said, intent on restructuring reality,
“Dudes who serve with both hands.”
It was sometimes best, when you came to the mystery that was art, to come as a child. The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.
Black people, he noted, as his eyes shifted restlessly down the thing’s length, didn’t look half dead under fluorescent light, the way white people did.
And Bobby was working on a new theory of personal deportment; he didn’t quite have the whole thing yet, but part of it involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous.
“Thrones and dominions,” the Finn said obscurely. “Yeah, there’s things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see? Sure, it’s just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it’s a whole universe. And every year it gets a little more crowded, sounds like . . .”
The sinister thing about a simstim construct, really, was that it carried the suggestion that any environment might be unreal, that the windows of the shopfronts she passed now with Andrea might be figments.
Mirrors, someone had once said, were in some way essentially unwholesome; constructs were more so, she decided.
Once, there was nothing there, nothing moving on its own, just data and people shuffling it around. Then something happened, and it . . . it knew itself. There’s a whole other story, about that, a girl with mirrors over her eyes and a man who was scared to care about anything. Something the man did helped the whole thing know itself. . . . And after that, it sort of split off into different parts of itself, and I think the parts are the others, the bright ones. But it’s hard to tell, because they don’t tell it with words, exactly. . . .”
“Stuck. What it is, I think there’s a jump some people have to make, sometimes, and if they don’t do it, then they’re stuck good . . . And Rudy never did it.”
“A tulpa’s a thought form, kind of. Superstition. Really heavy people can split off a kind of ghost, made of negative energy.”
Bobby decided that the place was still scary, now that he had it to himself, but that it was interesting enough to make the scariness worthwhile.
Most phone programs were equipped with cosmetic video subprograms written to bring the video image of the owner into greater accordance with the more widespread paradigms of personal beauty, erasing blemishes and subtly molding facial outlines to meet idealized statistical norms.
“Honey,” Jammer said, “you’ll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”
She was never certain, afterward, that the voices were real, but eventually she came to feel that they had been a part of one of those situations in which real becomes merely another concept.
My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you.
“He said God likes to talk to Himself . . .”
