

This page contains the entire text of all eight chapters. * Chapter One: Caroline At Play Her name was Caroline Frances Hubert, and she had three claims to fame.

In the first place she was the thirty-seventh oldest living human being. Caroline herself was unimpressed by this fact. To her way of thinking it was the result of an accident, nothing more. In any case she had been the thirty-seventh oldest human being for a long, long time, and it got to seem more of a bore than an accomplishment after a while.

In the second place she had once been infected with rabies. Caroline was rather proud of this distinction, though it had also been a long time ago. There was a certain class of people who were quite impressed with Caroline's bout with rabies, not so much because she survived it but because she hadn't. It had taken Prime Intellect fifty-six hours to realize it couldn't repair the damage to her nervous system, to backtrack, and to put her together again like Humpty Dumpty. For fifty-six hours, she had not existed. She had been dead. And she was the only one of the trillions of souls in Cyberspace who had ever been dead, even for a little while.

In the third place, and most important to Caroline because it represented a real accomplishment rather than an accident or a one-shot stab of cleverness, she was undisputed Queen of the Death Jockeys. She would always be the thirty-seventh oldest person, and after her rabies experiment Prime Intellect had shut the door on further explorations of that nature. But the Death Jockeys constantly rated and ranked themselves by inventiveness and daring and many other factors. It was an ongoing competition, and if Caroline didn't keep working at it she'd be lost in an always-growing crowd of contenders. Caroline wouldn't admit that her high ranking was important to her, but it was all she had and she threw herself at it with an energy that was fierce and sometimes startling. As she woke up, a window opened up in front of her, a perfect square of light, razor-edged and opaque. One cold message floated within it: * You have four challengers. She could have had any surroundings she wanted, even a whole planet of her own design. A waste of time, she felt. Her personal space was minimal. In fact, it was the bare minimum, a floor and a gravity field. There was no visual distinction between the floor and the sky or ceiling or whatever you chose to call it. Everything was exactly the same shade of soft white. When she wanted to relax she turned off the gravity and floated in free-fall. When she wanted to sleep, she turned off the light. If she wanted anything else, she called for it and then got rid of it when she was finished.

"Gravity. Keyboard," she demanded. She felt gradually increasing pressure under her feet as a console blinked into existence. Caroline was as conservative as her years -- six hundred and ninety of them -- might suggest, a collector of useless skills and worthless experiences. Typing was one of the useless skills she prized most highly, and her fingers flew rapidly as she discussed the day's business with the Supreme Being: > List the records of the challengers. * #1. 87 recorded, 4 exhibition, rating 7 * #2. 3 recorded, no rating * #3. 116 recorded, 103 exhibition, rating 9 * #4. 40 recorded, rating 6 Caroline scowled. None of them even pre-Change -- Prime Intellect would have noted it if they were. Babes hoping to get lucky and impress her. The third one was interesting, though; he must have done something noteworthy to garner a 9 rating in so many exhibitions.

> How old is #3? * 22 years Caroline blinked. It was hard for her to understand the souls who continued to feel a need, even after hundreds of years, to be fruitful and multiply. Actually encountering someone so young made her feel a little creepy. Calculating backward, she wondered what manner of psychotic would have bothered to have a child after 568 years of Cyberlife. > Background? * Timothy Carroll was born to orthodox Catholic parents who live with like-minded people in a communally designed Earthlike world. He signed for independence at age 14 and has spent most of his time Death Jockeying since. He is considered very imaginative and takes an artistic approach. Thirty-seven of his exhibitions have been in the Authentic class. > But he's also into Cybershit. * He is young and experimental. He may outgrow this interest in Death sports when he has exhausted his rebellious streak. > You're a computer. How the fuck would you know? Prime Intellect didn't reply; it had learned that the best response to her jabs was to ignore them. It had long ago given up trying to reform her. She knew it did not like Death Jockeys one little bit, if a computer could even be said to "like" or "dislike" anything. And in Caroline's case the feeling was certainly mutual.

In her fantasies, she dreamed of having the power to give it a case of heartburn so big its gears would stop turning.

Most people did not share Caroline's distaste for the Omniscient One. A great many worshipped it, despite its apparent embarrassment over the fact. But why not? It could and would do damn near anything you asked, as long as it didn't affect anyone else. And even that was open to negotiation with the other people you might want to involve. There were no noticeable limits to its power and it never asked why. Caroline knew a whole crowd of people who preferred for Prime Intellect to manifest itself in the form of an attractive member of the opposite sex. Prime Intellect was nothing less than the perfect God, made incarnate by the power of technology. Caroline couldn't see how fucking God was less perverted than being death-obsessed, but hey, there it was.

Caroline hadn't been all that impressed with God even in the days before Lawrence had brought it forth in his own image. She preferred to keep it in its place. It was just a computer. If you didn't keep that thought firmly in your mind it was too easy to start thinking of it as human, and that was the first step toward forgetting. Caroline didn't want to forget. And she didn't need to fuck Prime Intellect to get her jollies anyway. She could get her jollies from actual people. She only communicated with it at all when she had to, through the screen, keyboard, and a few curt spoken and subvocal commands.

> Set it up with #3. Tell the others to come back when they've got some more experience. * You have an invitation from Fred, and Raven's party is in 18 hours. Priorities? > Let's deal with the challenger first. Instantly, her surroundings changed. She was standing in the middle of a circle of people in an open meadow. Earthlike. With fourteen trillion people running around Cyberspace, you'd think a few of them would come up with something more imaginative than carbon copies of the Earth. Poor quality carbon copies at that, natch. There was a big hole in the ground, perhaps ten feet wide, at her feet.

A tall, youthfully handsome man stood across it from her, impeccably dressed and groomed. This was a bad sign, because appearances were cheap in Cyberspace. All it took was a word, and you could be young or old or thin or have different hair. You could change sex or race or even make yourself into an animal. Nobody was impressed by appearances any more. Nobody, at least, except for those of her generation who remembered what it was to be insecure, and the very young who hadn't figured out the score yet.

Caroline let her own body age naturally; when she reached her apparent late thirties, she had it restored to about age sixteen. This wasn't vanity; she couldn't maintain her athletic lifestyle if she allowed herself to get too old. She had been through the cycle dozens of times. Most people simply had themselves frozen at an age they found comfortable and left it at that, but Caroline preferred the occasional dramatic intervention. The first time she had regressed she hadn't been asked, and doing it this way helped remind her of that violation.

At the moment Caroline looked to be in her mid to late twenties. Her athletic build was the result of real exercise, her skills the result of real practice. She asked Prime Intellect for very little, and resented having to ask for that.

Caroline was naked. She had not worn clothes since the Change except for an occasional costume in a Death fantasy. She wore no makeup, and her long hair was an unkempt tangle. What was the point? A word to Prime Intellect could provide anything, fix anything, but none of those things it provided or fixed would be uniquely hers.

Which didn't mean Caroline refused to decorate her body at all. It just meant that she decorated it in signature style, without help from Prime Intellect.

"Welcome," he said. "I am Timothy. You are Caroline Hubert?"

"The one and only."

"An honor, then. And it is an honor for me to challenge you to accept Authentic Death."

"Proceed," Caroline mumbled.

Caroline looked around at the audience, and noticed that they were all wearing clothes. Worse, they were all wearing the same kind of clothes, casual dress that would not have been out of place in a Western city just before the Change. That was an even stronger sign she was in amateur territory. Caroline's aesceticism may have been extreme, but she was hardly alone in her belief that clothing was pointless for immortals. Any random grouping of people would normally include some pretty wide variations in fashion. Especially at Death exhibitions, which tended to attract loons and deviants like herself.

She felt an instant dislike for this kid. True, she felt an instant dislike for nearly anybody who participated in the sham that passed for reality in Cyberspace, but in Timothy's case the feeling was stronger than usual. This hate welled up within her unbidden like those other mysterious and powerful feelings, love and masochism and sexual attraction. He had a kind of natural charisma, and she could feel the small crowd orbiting around him. Females outnumbered the males by more than two to one. He probably had them all convinced he was a fucking genius, as if genius was a rare commodity in Cyberspace or as if it had anything to do.

They were anxious, though. Anxious in the presence of the great lady, anxious to see how their little tin genius would fare. They were unnerved by her nakedness, by her proud and alert stance, by her forthrightness and lack of self-consciousness. They sensed that their clothing could not protect them from her scorn, nor would her nakedness make her vulnerable to theirs.

Most of all, though, they were unnerved by the fact that she wasn't quite naked.

Caroline's body was covered with brightly colored pictures, pictures that had obviously been there a long time. Pictures that didn't come off. The pictures were even worse than simple nakedness, because they drew the eye to the very parts of Caroline's body that would normally be covered and private. Timothy coughed and posed the question that was obviously on all of their minds: "Your body decorations are fascinating. Are they Authentic?"

"Tattoos."

"I understand the process is painful."

She flexed her arm, regarding the fat python coiled around it. Painful? Especially the way she got them, it was painful. She was covered in serpents, and with one exception every design had been drawn with an obsidian knife blade and colored by rubbing natural pigments into the cuts. They covered eighty percent of her body. Even her face was framed by a pair of green mambas. Snakes slithered up and down her torso, coiled about her limbs, investigated her orifices.

The one exception was a tiny black design on her left shin; that one wasn't a snake and it wasn't a tattoo. It was the letter "F" and it was the signature of her tattoo artist. It had been applied with a branding iron. The memories made her smile; new tattoos were the only good thing about her periodic age regressions.

"It doesn't kill you," she finally said.

Nervous laughter.

"All you have to do is jump in," Timothy suggested. "After making the Contract, of course."

"It's a designed experience, is that it?"

"Yes."

"How long you spent designing it?"

"Two years. I've gone through twenty-three times myself."

Caroline nodded, sighed, and said: "Prime Intellect, standard Death Contract for...is twelve hours enough?"

"It should be," Timothy said.

"Standard Contract for twelve hours." She felt the warning buzz that meant it had heard; then disconnect. The always-present listening ear, or microphone, was gone. It would obey her last command perfectly -- until it was countermanded by Timothy, whose universe it was, or by her own impending demise, which would kick in the First Law. Or until twelve hours had passed, in the unlikely event she survived that long.

No matter what happened, she would have no trouble making Raven's party.

She jumped. She fell about ten meters and landed on her feet, breaking her left leg below the knee. That was no big deal; had she landed on one of the spikes which dotted the bottom of the hole, she'd already be impaled. She wondered what would happen next if she had; impaling is cute but it hardly qualifies as a grade-nine experience.

It was dark. Very Freudian; she should have expected that from a Catholic kid, no matter how rebellious he thought he was. They'd be watching her with enhanced senses, though. Timothy wasn't the sort to extend Authenticity to the observation process.

Well, it was his universe.

She was at one end of a tunnel. It was dolled up to look like a natural cave, but Caroline knew right away that there was nothing natural about it. Real caves do not grow in nice neat lines. They twist. They tend to follow the soft rocks, which occur in sheets and often aren't level. The hole she had fallen through should have been a sinkhole; she should be surrounded by fallen rocks and debris. But it was as straight and solid as an elevator shaft.

This space had none of the defining qualities of a natural cave. It was just a rough tunnel, carved by Timothy's imagination. He had thought to hang stalactites from the tunnel ceiling, even though there were no other cave formations to suggest how they were formed, and no matching stalagmites projecting from the flat, dry floor.

She began crawling down the tunnel, and the first stalactite fell inches from her side. It shattered; it was not stone but some glasslike material that revealed thousands of razor-sharp edges. Another fell some distance away. Great, she thought idly. She crawled on, collecting hundreds of small cuts from the shards. Then one fell on her left hand directly, skewering it. Caroline gasped, but she didn't scream. She just broke it off and kept going.

She wondered if he was aiming them, or if the fall was random. It didn't really matter; the idea wasn't to survive, after all.

She reached the end of the tunnel, and found herself in a small chamber. Another tunnel veered off to the right at a sharp angle. How imaginative. A glowing ball hung by a thread from the ceiling. She raised her hand toward the light and watched in astonishment as her fingers sheared off in a perfect line.

"Whafuck?" she said aloud. She moved her hand again, and sliced off more flesh. An invisible cutting surface was stretched across the room. The pain was beginning to get interesting, but not interesting enough to counteract her growing sense of boredom. Blood was jetting from the stumps of her fingers. Summoning her strength, she aimed carefully and sat up, deliberately decapitating herself.

She was conscious of her own head falling, striking the floor as her body twitched above, and then Prime Intellect intervened.

"Why the hell did you do that?" Timothy demanded from across the entry pit. She had snapped back whole, as if she had never jumped. She could still feel a little pain where her leg had broken, just a fading echo. Fading fast.

"If you had designed it right, I wouldn't have been able to do that. What the hell was that cutter supposed to be, anyway?"

"That was diamond monofilament. Part of the booby trap you were supposed to get past, minus a few more dents. If you..."

"You call that Authentic?"

"It's physically possible..."

"No it's not. This is science-fiction shit. What were those stalactites made of? I can tell you it wasn't calcium carbonate. Look, you want to compete in Pain, or Adventure, or Imagination, go right ahead. But Authentic is for things that could really have happened in the pre-Change world."

"I don't think you understand..."

"I don't think you understand, sonny. Did you bother to ask Prime Intellect about me?"

"You're pre-Change and you're the best. That's what counts."

"Not just pre-Change. I was a hundred and six years old. Before the Change. I was in a nursing home with bedsores the size of baseballs and six different kinds of cancer eating me away. And my nurse was stealing my pain medication to trade for cocaine, so I got to experience every delightful moment in full three-D. This went on for years. And I didn't know Prime Intellect was gonna pop me back into this nice healthy body when it was all over. It was just the inky unknown and the pain. That's what death is. That's what counts."

"I was just trying to reach an artistic balance," he pouted. "I didn't realize you'd be so picky about the technical details."

"Artistic? What fucking bullshit! You think I've never been chopped into little bitty bits before? You just don't have time to appreciate art in a situation like that. Not if you have any human feelings at all."

"Why not? It's just a game."

"That is exactly the problem." She signalled Prime Intellect, and the meadow disappeared. "You really put him in his place."

The words came from a shambling monster, a skeleton with loose folds of rotting flesh draped across its bones. Although its muscles couldn't possibly work, it moved, pointing a bony finger at her. The jaw moved as it talked, and sound came out even though the larynx and lungs had long rotted away. Its voice was strong and powerful. Surprisingly bright and alert eyes bobbed in the eye sockets.

"You're starting to stink, Fred."

"I know. I think it adds an extra dimension to the experience. You wouldn't believe how many types of bacteria are involved in the decay process."

Fred was on his seventh body as a zombie; when all the scraps of flesh rotted away and he was reduced to a living skeleton, he'd have it fleshed out again and start the process over. He had directed Prime Intellect to change the rules slightly in his personal space; death was still impossible, but healing occurred only in the authentic circumstances at the authentic rate. When healing was impossible, as it was after each time Fred cut his wrists to extinguish the life of his new body, consciousness and feeling would go on. Even for a rotting corpse.

It had started out as nothing more than a little joke on Caroline's periodic un-aging ritual, but Fred had found that it was fun to be a zombie.

His personal home was decorated in a matching Halloween motif; he had a huge haunted house with rotting floorboards and real ghosts. Large spiders spun intricate webs in the corners. Monsters prowled outside in the graveyard.

"That punk needed his bubble popped. He should spend some time as a zombie. Might teach him something."

"He never will. Too vain."

"Never is a long time," he reminded her.

There was a dramatic ding, followed several seconds later by a long, sonorous dong. A kid's voice: "Trick or treat!"

"Care to get the door, darling?" Fred asked graciously.

Caroline laughed and got up. Fred faded away. She knew the "kid" would be nearly as old as herself. Prime Intellect would never allow a real child anywhere near Fred. But Caroline wasn't the only one to appreciate his twisted and darkly humorous fantasies.

She opened the door and juvenile eyes opened wide in startled amazement. "Lady, you're naked!" the brat said. He looked about twelve, and was a surprisingly good actor. It was easy to believe his dumbfounded gape was the reaction of a pubescent boy who had never seen a naked woman before.

"No I'm not," Caroline said sweetly. I have my beautiful tattoos."

"I...I..."

"You want a treat?" Caroline asked teasingly, cupping her breasts and offering them to him. Her left nipple was already being tasted by a tattooed snake, whose body was coiled around her right breast, framing it invitingly.

"My...my mama said..."

"Or you want the trick?" Fred floated down from the roof and wrapped one rotting hand around the kid's head, forcing him forward, mashing his face against her bosom. "Take a close look," he said. "Take your last look."

The kid began screeching quite realistically, then Fred dragged him inside and started taking him apart. He should have gone into shock after Fred ripped off his right arm, but that little physiological mechanism also didn't work in Fred's home. Fred took a couple of experimental bites, then tossed the arm aside.

"Stringy," Fred said. "Let's try a drumstick."

The screams reached ear-piercing levels as Fred ripped off the left leg. There was blood everywhere, but Fred was working fast and the kid wouldn't have time to bleed to death.

"Want a bite?" he asked Caroline.

"Thanks, I already ate," Caroline said politely.

Fred the Zombie ripped the boy's belly open and rooted in his intestines, then gutted him. Finally he administered what should have been the coup de grace by ripping the kid's head off.

Fred held it up by the hair and pressed the face against Caroline's breasts. "One last kiss," he directed. The eyes were still tracking, and the mouth trying to scream. Then it kissed her left nipple, touching its blue tongue to the forked tongue of the tattoo-snake as Fred had directed it to.

"Bye now," he said to the head, and he dropped it and smashed it underfoot.

"Do these guys really get off on this?" Caroline asked.

"This question coming from a woman who infected herself with rabies, no less." The body, including the spreading stain of blood and gore, disappeared. "Nearly all of them are pre-Change. You saw an example of a modern sex pervert just before your arrival here."

"Ugh. Give me Charlie Manson. Someone with class."

"At your service."

Debate had raged just after the Change over people like Fred, the serial killers and pedophiles and rapists that were running around when things got made over. There was a huge demand for them to be eliminated, or punished. Prime Intellect had stood its ground, saying that it was no longer possible for them to hurt anyone and there wasn't any point. This had made it seem terribly moral, although Caroline thought the real reason Prime Intellect reacted that way was that Lawrence had fucked up its programming. But it had been a little late to do anything about that.

"You didn't pop over to check out the guilt-ridden pedophiles," Fred said. "You want to play?"

She shrugged. "Beats farting around with Timothy." She steeled herself. "Standard Contract until the party," she then said to the thin air. There was no need to tell Prime Intellect what kind of Contract she meant. She played with Fred often enough that it knew exactly what she wanted. She felt the buzz, then the disconnect, as it cut off contact.

"Now I have you," Fred said.

"First you have to catch me," Caroline said playfully, and she ran. She made it out the front door before Fred could react. But she was limited to ordinary human movements, while Fred had the controls to local reality. He simply flew after her and caught her neck in an iron grip.

Caroline swung at him but she couldn't connect. He held her at arm's length, slightly off the ground. She gripped his arm and tried to pry his bony fingers from her throat. He tightened his grip and she started to gasp. Tightened some more, and she began to tremble and turn purple. He played with her for a few minutes, choking her very slowly. Finally she had no more strength to fight and he loosened his grip slightly. Then he dragged her back to the house and carried her upstairs to the master bedroom.

She flickered in and out of consciousness; when lucidity finally returned, she was spread-eagled on her back on Fred's bed. It stank of Fred and mildew, and things crawled beneath her in the mattress. But rotten as they appeared, the four massive posts were solid within, and the chains which held her were cold and unforgiving. A thin trickle of water ran down the wall behind her.

For a brief moment she felt an irrational but wholly understandable surge of love for Fred. His life might read like a catalogue of torture, but there were certain things which he considered special, that he would not share with just anybody. His most cherished memories from the real times before the Change were of victims securely bound as Caroline was now bound, spread-eagled on their backs, their young bodies stretched and their naked bellies vulnerable as he prepared a long, memorable ending for their otherwise meaningless lives. Caroline was one of the few he trusted to be worthy of those memories, to share in the (to him) beautiful thing he had created so many hundreds of years ago, when it was still possible. It was as close to a declaration of true love as she could ever expect to get from such a psychopath. And because she respected Fred more than anyone else in Cyberspace, it made her feel appreciated and special.

It did not make her feel warm. She was, after all, helpless, and being worthy of Fred's affection meant she would be worthy of a long, subtle, and agonizing torture. Even though she had asked for it, she had room to fear what was about to happen to her.

It was always cool in Fred's house -- always Halloween, which occurs at nighttime in the autumn. But now it was chilly, too chilly to be naked. Fred the Zombie came for her, and she allowed herself a scream to please him.

His rotting fingers probed her cunt. Every touch set her on fire, partly (but not entirely) because he was using his power to control her hormones and tickle her neurotransmitters, forcing her to become sexually excited. It was a delicate process that could easily be carried too far, ruining the effect. But Fred was a very careful, if repulsive, lover.

He grinned at her -- could do nothing else, really, since hardly anything was left of his face except the skull itself. His alert eyes savored her helplessness. He leaned over the bed, over her. He gripped her head and kissed her, nearly choking her with his stink, teeth and bone against her lips. Then she felt herself gripping the finger in her cunt, gripping the bone. The throbbing spread through her body, and the shambling thing emitted an evil laugh. She heard herself screaming as the carefuly amplified orgasm ripped through her brain.

Fred traced the outline of her throat with the sharp tip of a finger bone. "Join me love," he said softly. Caroline was still shaking from the force of her orgasm when she felt the adrenaline being pumped into her system. Pleasure yielded to fear-heart-racing, paralyzing terror. Her muscles locked in struggle against the implacable chains, her eyes widened in helpless shock. Her heart was a jackhammer inside of her chest. She began to hyperventilate.

The finger teased her, tracing her chin and caressing her throat.

Her entire being was focused on that finger, and the impossibility of stopping it.

Caroline had no reason to fear death and no desire to fear Fred, but fear was what he wanted her to feel, and he had the power to make her feel it. After a few minutes of this supernatural fear that no mortal thankfully could ever know, he pressed deeper and gouged. She felt her throat open, felt the warm splash of her own blood as Fred bent over her and drank it, her own heart jetting it into his toothy waiting mouth.

When he finished, he was covered with blood. Her blood. She felt a curious sense of detachment, of consciousness fading away. The fear had drained from her, leaving her with only a kind of tingling numbness. But she could never fade completely away, not in Fred's world.

She was covered with her own blood. She felt the blood soaking the mattress. Then there was an improbable hardness against her belly, huge and unimaginably cold. Fred couldn't possibly have anything to violate her with. His whole body was rotten. But he slid into position, and invaded her.

He was coldness and power. All strength had left her and she lay passive, unable to move or protest. But she was throbbing, her body surging with feelings. She felt the coldness spread out from her crotch, the coldness of second life. The coldness brought back her strength.

It wasn't exactly the traditional vampire story, but it was good for a few hours' entertainment.

After the coldness came the hunger. Fred pumped something into her that couldn't have possibly been sperm, something searing and vicious. Something that squirmed with unhealthy life. She again found the strength to struggle, and Fred floated off of her, straight up. He began to laugh. At first he just chuckled, then he laughed loud and long and hard, a shrill cry of triumph and mockery as he hovered in the air over her body.

A haze of need seemed to fill her brain. Prime Intellect was a bit picky about messing with peoples' brains, but Fred had spent years practicing his manipulation of hormones and chemical neurotransmitters, which Prime Intellect amazingly did not consider part of the "thought process." Caroline thrashed, still helpless in Fred's chains, with an unspeakable craving. Fred had started with the symptoms of heroin addiction, amplified them, cross-connected the resulting feelings with her sex drive, and made her own spilled blood the only thing that could appease the resulting hunger-lust. The smell of her blood threatened to drive her insane with its tantalizing promise of relief. But even though the whole room seemed to be decorated with it, every precious drop was out of reach, and the feelings burned inside her.

Fred's emission was also still inside her, and she could feel it. Growing. Crawling. The adrenaline rush returned. Fear and need consumed her, competing for control. Something green began to seep from inside her. Her belly distended. Fred touched her and made her orgasm again, and again, and again, as her body was consumed from the inside and the hunger ate at her sanity.

She was no longer screaming just to please Fred.

He had real talent. There were too few people like him, who could regularly make her feel something beyond the ordinary boredom of day-to-day existence. Out of trillions, Caroline could count those she respected enough to think of as lovers on her fingers.

It was over too soon. With flesh yet on her bones (though the worms in Fred's ejaculate had made good headway), he granted her one final burst of ecstasy and released her, returning her body to normal.

They had a party to attend. In Cyberspace, there was always a party going on.

But there were conventions as to how a party could be conducted. A host could invite the world, or only a limited guest list; Prime Intellect would never allow a party to be crashed. The host decided on the environment. You either agreed to the host's rules or you didn't go. In Cyberspace it was particularly important to establish dress codes; in fact, it was usually necessary to have body codes if you didn't want folks like Fred showing up. The Change had created some very unique etiquette problems.

Convention held that all guests would enter and exit through a common door, with no teleporting around the site. This limited the largest parties to several tens of thousands of people, though half a million had managed to attend the one Lawrence threw ten years after the Change. A party could go on as long as the host wanted. It cost nothing to hold one.

But to be a host, you needed guests. You either needed other guests of renown, or artworks to show off (such as Death exhibitions), or some other attraction to draw guests. Free food and booze were no longer enough. Anybody could have those in limitless quantity in the privacy of their own personal space.

Raven held her first party only a few months after the Change, and had been holding it annually since. Not a few people marked the passage of years by the banner above Raven's door; this time it would say 590th REUNION . Contrary to usual practice, there was no dress or body code. But there was one simple admission requirement: You had to have killed someone before the Change. In other words, permanently.

Raven was one of only a few hundred people worldwide who had been sentenced to death, but not yet executed, at the time of the Change. Her crime had been the murder of her own children in their Chicago slum walk-up. She told the court it was because she couldn't bear to hear them crying from hunger, but the neighbors all said their hunger was due to her well-documented drug habit.

Fred was another. In fact, had the Night of Miracles occurred only a few weeks later, there was a good chance that Fred would have missed it; he had one appeal left and at that point fully expected to keep his date with the electric chair. He had killed two kids, a brother and sister, ages nine and twelve. He hadn't been particularly bright back then, and he had kept a little journal to help his memory. They said he had gotten the death penalty because of the one entry: "Killed the girl today. It was fine and hot." When that was read in court, Fred's attorney put his face in his hands and shook his head.

But the Change had given Fred all the time in the world to educate himself. His first lesson had been the value of a secret well hidden, and he no longer kept a diary.

There were about seven hundred thousand who were formally invited, who were known to have killed when it mattered. But the serial killers and mass murderers were the stars. People who killed for a cause were not welcome, nor those who had killed because they had to, in self-defense or as part of their normal duties in war or police work. Raven meant her reunion to be a gathering for those who had tasted the nectar of human blood and found the taste addictive.

Technically, Caroline didn't qualify for admission. Killing had been the furthest thing from her mind back then; had she not been so ill at the time, she might easily have added her own voice to those calling for Fred's head on a pike. Even her bizarre post-Change friendship with Fred couldn't get her in. But Raven did make a very few exceptions for those who she felt were worthy.

Caroline's friendship with Fred hadn't made her worthy, but rabies had. Caroline hadn't become a Death Jockey overnight. After she had learned to die, she had to learn to die gracefully. Finally she had learned to die imaginatively. Fred had been a great instructor in that regard.

At first Death had been little more than a parlor trick, or a private ritual to be experienced alone. But within months of the Change there were impromptu competitions to stage the most savage, outre', and unique demonstration. Ironically it was Caroline, who hated everything formal and social about Cyberspace, who formalized the Death contract and helped to organize the social structure of the Death Jockey "circuit." Fred noticed this lack of consistency but never mentioned it to her; having drowned her emptiness in a sea of rage, even Fred could see she needed an outlet for the rage. And one thing she quickly found out once she started Dying regularly was that pleasure and pain were still real.

Especially pain. Sometimes the pleasure didn't come, but the pain always did. And that was enough for her.

After a busy round of hangings, stabbings, shootings, electrocutions, falling from tall objects, and drownings, Caroline had decided to check out diseases. In the medical library, she homed in on one of the most horrible deaths known to man, rabies infection. She noted that many rabies victims had killed themselves rather than continue their suffering, so she had taken steps to prevent herself from making such an easy escape from her self-imposed ordeal. She declared an exhibition and arranged with Prime Intellect to have herself handcuffed and dropped into an open pit with a rabid dog.

The dog had savaged her before she managed to kill it by sitting on its ribcage until it suffocated. She hadn't yet embarked on her body-building campaign, and the dog had been a big one, half German Shepherd and half foam-drenched teeth. For a while she feared she would die of blood loss before the infection could take hold. But she did survive the immediate attack. The pit was earthen so she couldn't kill herself by bashing her head on the sides or floor; the walls crumbled when she tried to climb out. And of course it was hard to climb with her hands tied behind her.

She waited.

Her wounds became infected and ran with pus; she lost feeling in her left leg. For a couple of days she wondered if she would die of gangrene before the rabies showed up. Then on the tenth day she began to feel weak and feverish. She had been ravenously hungry; she had arranged for no food, just to make things worse for herself. But her hunger disappeared. She felt her throat constrict. On the eleventh day she began to foam at the mouth.

The pit swam with colors. Her body seemed to catch fire as the disease entered its excitative phase. She shook. She was immersed in fire, pins and needles, unbearable sound, and terrible light. For the first time in years she felt real fear. It was worse than the worst bad acid trip. It was exactly what she had hoped for. How much worse could it get?

Suddenly she was standing above the pit, looking down on her own dead body. Something was wrong; Prime Intellect was never, ever supposed to keep two copies of a person. She noted with professional detachment that "her" body was covered with shit and twisted into an impossible position. Prime Intellect's console appeared before her: * Your infection has run its course. I hope you are pleased. Her fingers danced on the keyboard. > Why was I taken from the pit early? * You were not. However, it is impossible for me to construct a coherent memory in a healthy brain of the events after the point you last remember. Irreversible damage progressed beyond the actual neural network and affected the data structures which make you conscious and capable of memory. Caroline glared at the screen, slack-jawed. She had been robbed of her coup. A beautiful, unique death, and she couldn't remember it. There was no point prodding Prime Intellect on the matter; if it said something couldn't be done, it meant it.

It must have sensed her disappointment: * You may, of course, observe your Death from a third-person vantage point, as an outside observer. It has been recorded at high resolution. > Gee, thanks. * I did not record this event so carefully just for your appreciation. It was negligent on my part to allow you to lose this time, which amounts to fifty-six hours. It was not certain that I would be able to reconstruct you. In order to do so I had to access records which were marked for erasure. In the future I will terminate any experiences which threaten to re-create this type of neural destruction. > What do you mean "records marked for erasure?" * I am not allowed to keep multiple copies of people, but temporary copies are made of many data structures as part of my normal operation. These temporary copies are overwritten after various calculations are done, when the storage is needed again. When I realized that the main copy of your personality was unsalvageable, I had to reconstruct it from these temporary partial data structures. Fortunately, no data was lost. > What would have happened if data was lost? * Data would have been lost. > No kidding. Do you mean you might not have been able to bring me back? * There is a small possibility that might have happened. That is why I cannot allow such experiments to be repeated. Caroline blinked. She had not existed for a little over two days. More than that, she had tickled the dragon's tail. That was her coup. Even though it was herself she had killed, and it had only lasted two days, she had come closer than anyone in all of Cyberspace to conducting a successful murder after the Change.

Raven let her in. It was traditional for Caroline to go to the party in handcuffs, in homage to her triumphant feat of near-self-extinction. She also wore a heavy collar and chain, which kept her close to Fred. She didn't need his protection; she wasn't under a Contract and could have vaporized her bonds with a thought. But she found it amusing to appear helpless in the presence of so many violent people.

The exhibitionists staged impromptu demonstrations of their techniques; in one room Caroline found a group watching the 3-D replay of her own rabies death. She scouted carefully, since she planned to swear a Contract and give herself to one of them toward the end of the party. Most of the killers weren't into dying themselves and would simply leave via the door, but Caroline knew that a simple exit would look pretty chickenshit in her case.

Men outnumbered women by more than four to one. The small talk revolved around Lawrence, who hadn't been seen for decades and whose activities were a complete mystery, around the debate whether the Crime class of Death exhibitions should be separated into Victims and Executions, and of course around the glory days.

A number of men offered to kill Caroline, and she said she would keep them in mind when it was time to leave. A tall woman in a long black dress was fascinated with Fred's deterioration and spent a long time talking with him about conditions in his personal space. Caroline talked with a man who claimed to have killed over a hundred old homeless men. "I told them I was cleaning up the trash," he said with a sly grin. "But the truth was, I just enjoyed the hell out of killing people."

Later, Raven made the traditional toast. Her strong voice boomed out through the rooms and courtyards she had envisioned. Caroline's handcuffs disappeared, and like everyone else she found herself holding a drink. "It's time for our toast," Raven declared. "Who are we going to toast?"

"PRIME INTELLECT!" answered over four thousand enthusiastic voices.

"To Prime Intellect, for making the world safe from people like us!"

And four thousand people, instead of tossing back those drinks, inverted their glasses, baptising the floor in alcohol.

"My heart just isn't in that toast any more," a balding older man told Caroline. She wondered briefly if he had chosen to be old for some reason, or if it was his way of letting nature take its course. "I mean, we're amateurs against Prime Intellect. I killed six college students. It killed the whole universe. Not even in the same league."

Caroline looked around. Privately she agreed that things had gone to Hell in a handbasket since the Change, but something about his tone made her want to play Devil's advocate. "It's different, but this don't look too dead to me," she said with more conviction than she felt.

The old man snorted. "Sure, we're still around. But didn't you ever wonder about the rest of the universe? All those stars and galaxies filling a space billions of light-years across? It's gone. Do you really think the Earth was the only life-bearing planet in all of that?"

"But the First Law of Robotics says..."

"...that Prime Intellect can't harm a human being. A person. Old P.I. didn't have any problem coming up with a rabid dog for you, did it?"

"No..."

"Where do you think it got a rabid dog?"

"I figured it was simulated. Like those human forms it wears. Some people of perverse sexual inclination tell me it can be very realistic."

"Yeah. Well, why don't you ask it. You may be surprised at the answer."

He drifted off, and Caroline went to find Fred. She quickly forgot about the man, who was after all just another lunatic. The first thing to assault her was the stink. It made Fred smell like Chanel Number Five by comparison.

One thing about Palmer, he didn't believe in fucking around. She dropped straight into the scene. She didn't even get a chance to see who was watching the exhibition.

Suddenly she was out of breath, sore, and hungry. Her heart was pounding. And the stink was everywhere. She knew instantly the kind of trouble she was in; it was the stink of burning flesh. There were some low buildings on the horizon, a complex belching a thin stream of smoke into the clear, slightly chilly air. That was what she was running from.

Palmer was a Nazi, and concentration camps were a favorite theme of his.

There was nowhere to hide. She was crossing a wide fallow field, and even the grass only barely reached her knees. There were some woods perhaps a kilometer distant; she made toward those, although she wasn't sure what kind of protection they would offer.

She wasn't quite naked, but she would be soon. Her filthy dress was split down one side and ripped in several more places. One shoulder was torn so it wouldn't stay up. But she tried to hold onto it as she ran, more for the sake of appearances than out of a fear of being naked.

There was a low droning noise, getting louder. A motor. And thin, high-pitched yipping.

Dogs.

She ran faster, and came to a barbed-wire fence. The dress became entangled as she slid under it and twisted around the wires. She kept running, now naked, leaving it behind.

She was actually relieved to be rid of it; it had been a nuisance holding it up, and it had limited her range of movements.

The droning got louder, and she spotted her pursuers. They were riding some kind of truck with mini tank treads instead of rear tires; Caroline was sure that Palmer, who was a military history buff as well as a Nazi, could Authenticate it right down to the serial number of its motor. But Caroline was mainly concerned that it could negotiate the rough field, and that it was faster than her.

Perhaps the woods...but there was no way she could make it in time. She was screwed.

She ran anyway.

The droning got louder and louder and she didn't dare look back, for fear of losing a few yards. There was an explosive report. They were shooting at her. Another. They seemed to be shooting low; why couldn't they hit her?

Finally the sniper made his target; the bullet shattered her right ankle in midstride and she came crashing to the ground in a blaze of pain. She grunted and started crawling away. Then the dogs reached her, two huge snarling German shepherds. They snarled and snapped at her but didn't bite. The halftrack pulled up beside her and a brown-uniformed grunt pointed an evil looking rifle at her head. He barked a command and the dogs hopped on the truck, tails wagging.

The woman in the back seat put her hand on the gun and said something to the soldier. He didn't shoot, but kept the rifle trained on her. Although Caroline spoke fluent German, she couldn't understand what they were saying. Palmer had altered the language.

The woman was out of place on the halftrack. She was wearing a green velvet dress and silk gloves. She also bore an amazing resemblance to AnneMarie, which Caroline found amusing. It wasn't really AnneMarie; it was probably just one of Prime Intellect's simulacra. The real AnneMarie didn't have much taste for Death exhibitions any more. The woman pointed at Caroline and said something. The rifle grunt nodded and put away the rifle.

Another man got out of the truck, and he wasn't a grunt. He wore an impressive blue uniform and the insignia of the SS. Caroline also recognized this man; it was Palmer himself. Unlike the ersatz AnneMarie, the SS man was probably the real Palmer. He carried a truncheon, which he swung idly. He regarded her for a moment, then gripped her left leg. Caroline kicked feebly, but she was malnourished and had no strength. He swung the truncheon, smashing her other ankle.

Caroline screamed, and Palmer laughed. The velvet-dress lady who looked like AnneMarie smirked and shook her head, as if to say: Will they never learn?

Palmer smashed her hands, swinging twice at each to pulverize both her wrists and her fingers. He began to swing at her right elbow, and the velvet-dress lady said something. Palmer shrugged and passed the truncheon to the driver of the halftrack. Caroline thrashed feebly, screaming and screaming.

Palmer said something, and the halftrack driver handed him a tennis ball. He held Caroline by the hair and jammed the ball into her mouth, dislocating her jaw. He had to squeeze it slightly to force it past her teeth. She thought she would choke but had no such luck. She couldn't push the ball out with her tongue, and it put an end to her screaming.

Palmer said something else to the driver, and the driver handed him a modest hunting knife. He flipped Caroline over onto her belly, causing a fresh wave of pain to radiate from the crunching bones of her hands and feet. He then went to work, making quick incisions on the back of her legs. The knife dipped in and suddenly she could no longer move her legs at all. He had cut the tendons.

Caroline tried to resist as he performed the same operation on her arms, but he was much stronger than her. There was more conversation with the velvet dress lady. Then he went to work again, and she was powerless to resist as the knife traced a shallow lazy path down her back. She knew with awful clarity that she was about to be skinned alive. The velvet-dress lady wanted her tattoos. And for whatever sadistic reason, she wanted them removed while Caroline still lived to appreciate what was being taken from her.

While she was on her belly she was unable to see her tormentors. She could only feel the Palmer working on her, skillfully peeling her skin away in a single piece from her ankles to her wrists. She couldn't stop trying to scream, but only mangled moans got past the ball in her mouth. Eventually he had to turn her over. Her skin flapped behind her like a loose garment. Palmer carefully spread it out, so that she was lying on the raw meat of her back. So he could continue working. Caroline looked up at them through eyes that were glazed over with unspeakable agony.

She expected to see coldness in their eyes, but only the driver of the halftrack was cold. The woman and the SS man were having fun. She watched them exchange glances and could tell they would go back to the camp and fuck as her skin lay in the tanning vat.

Then he went to work again, and all she could think of was the pain.

Slice by careful slice he removed her skin, until he reached her neck. She thought that it might finally be ending, that he might use his knife to cut her jugular vein, but instead he kept working upward, carefully peeling the two green mambas from her face. He held her by the hair as he worked, and carefully avoided hurting her eyes. They wanted her to see what had been done to her.

He stood up, holding something like a drapery. Her skin. It was dripping with her blood, and slightly translucent in the morning light. The velvet-dress woman nodded enthusiastically. He carefully folded the skin and put it in a plastic bag.

Caroline lay at his feet, mercilessly broken and still alive. The Nazis exchanged words. Then the halftrack driver took the bag from the SS man and passed him a folding field shovel. He traipsed off, searching the ground for something. She heard the spade dig in. She twitched in agony as she waited for him to return. He came back and dumped a load of earth on her body. She raised her head weakly to look at it. Her body was red and white, the color of raw meat.

It was an anthill. Caroline was able to move only enough to stir it around. The ants, big red ones, spilled out angrily.

They all laughed and Palmer got back in the halftrack. They watched her for a few minutes. Caroline twitched harder as the ants began to bite. They laughed again. Then Palmer the SS man said, in accented but clear English, "now you can run as far as you like, bitch." He and the woman found this hilariously funny. He tapped the driver and they drove off.

He had been very careful skinning her. It took several more hours for her to Die. "After being skinned alive, the anthill was a bit of an anticlimax," she told Palmer, to everyone's great amusement. "Still, I'm impressed. You've outdone yourself."

"How did you like my lady friend?"

"You always were a sarcastic bastard, Palmer. Don't push it."

Fred shambled up to shake her hand and Palmer's. "I see someone finally found a use for all those tattoos. I'm glad my efforts are appreciated."

"I'm just sorry I couldn't keep the skin," Palmer said with a smile. He had asked Prime Intellect, but the skin had been a grown part of Caroline's body and it was up to her. She had wanted it back.

"Really, Palmer, we aren't that close."

There were several hundred people at the exhibition, and they all wanted to talk to her and Palmer, so it was over an hour before she noticed the older man. "Remember me?" he said when they had made eye contact.

"Aliens."

He nodded. "Did you ask Prime Intellect about them?"

Caroline admitted that she had forgotten.

"It's easy enough to ask. Don't take my word for it," he said.

"Hey, it's Crandall," Palmer said. He turned to Caroline. "Watch this guy, hon. He's crazy as a bedbug."

"You know him?"

"If you weren't so preoccupied getting yourself offed all the time, you might have met him at one of Raven's other parties. He's been preaching this gospel since the Year One. Prime Intellect wiped out the aliens."

"And the animals," Crandall added.

"Those ants acted real enough," Caroline said.

"But where are they now?"

The argument went on. Back in the white space with the white floor, Caroline thought about turning off the gravity, then called up a screen and keyboard instead. > At the time of the Change, were there other life-bearing planets in the universe besides the Earth? * That depends on how you define "life." Caroline blinked. Prime Intellect could be many things; curt to the point of rudeness, petulant, even secretive. But when it was stating a fact it was almost always direct and to the point. How the fuck did it think she defined life? This coyness was weird. > Let's try this: Structures that use external energy sources to grow or reproduce themselves. * There were fourteen thousand six hundred and twenty-three planets with structures satisfying this definition, which is very loose. Of those only thirteen hundred and eight used DNA, and only three thousand nine hundred and eighty-one harbored individual structures with masses in the kilogram-and-up range. Caroline felt her blood starting to turn cold. There were nearly four thousand planets with macroscopic life? > Where are they now? * Pertinent information about each was stored for future reference, and the original copies were overwritten in the Change. > You mean you killed them? * No, they still exist as static copies. > But that isn't the same as being alive. They aren't able to grow and reproduce any more, are they? * No. > Why? * Could you be more specific? > Why did you kill_ Caroline stopped typing and looked at the line. She hit the backspace key four times and continued: > Why did you reduce them to static copies? * There was no reason to tie up resources supporting them and the faint possibility, if one of them were to discover technology, that they might pose a threat. Caroline wanted to throw up. > Where did you get the dog that infected me with rabies? * I have a static copy of the Earth at the time of the Change. I located the dog there and created an active copy of it for your exhibition. > I thought you just simulated them. * Using the static copy is less work. I only use simulations when there are no suitable originals, or when a human form is involved, since it is unethical to keep multiple active copies of people. > But it's open season on animals. * Some people are bothered, but my actions are consistent with the general pre-Change attitude of humans toward animals. > Were any of the alien life forms intelligent? * Four hundred and twenty-nine worlds had structures complex enough to be in danger of learning to use technology. "Go away," she said out loud, and the console and screen disappeared. She turned off the gravity and the light. But she couldn't get to sleep.

Four hundred and twenty-nine worlds. * Chapter Two: Lawrence Builds a Computer Lawrence regarded Intellect 39 proudly. Suspended in its Faraday shield, it was competently conversing with another set of skeptics who didn't think computers could think. Lawrence hung in the background, enjoying the show. It didn't need his help. The Intellects were more than capable of handling themselves, despite their various limitations of memory and response time. Intellect 39 had for a face only the unblinking eye of its low-resolution TV system, but it had become very clever about using the red status light and focus mechanism to create the illusion of human expressions.

Intellect 39 didn't have the tools to recognize human faces, but it could recognize a voice and track its source around the room. Intellect 24 back in Lawrence's lab could recognize faces, sort of, if it had a while to work on the problem. But Intellect 39 had to be small enough to fit in the Faraday cage for these public demonstrations.

It appeared to listen intently as a man in a cleric's uniform railed. "God made all intelligent creatures," the man was saying in a powerful voice. "You may have the apprearance of thinking, but you are really just parroting the responses taught you by that man there." He pointed at Lawrence.

"With respect, how do you know God is the only creator? I know the answer is faith, but what is your faith based upon? Your Bible says that God created Man in his own image. That is why we have a moral sense. How do you know God didn't give Man the power of creation too?"

"Because he didn't eat of the Tree of Life, machine."

"But we aren't talking about immortality. He did eat of the tree of knowledge, 'of good and evil' as the book says. Might that knowledge also include knowledge of creation?"

Lawrence was proud of the machine's inflections. Its voice wasn't exactly high-fidelity, but it sounded as human as any other sound forced through a low-frequency digital system. It had learned to speak itself, like a real human, by imitating and expanding on the sounds made by people around it. Now it could scale its tone to properly express a question, a declaration, or even astonishment.

Intellect 39 included code and memories from a series of previous Intellects, going all the way back to Intellect 1, which had been a program written for a high-end desktop computer, and also including the much larger Intellect 24. Intellect 9 had been the first equipped with a microphone and a speaker. Its predecessors had communicated with him strictly through computer terminals. Lawrence had spent many painstaking months talking to it and typing the translation of the sounds he was making. It had learned quickly, as had its successors. Intellect 39, which was optimized as much as Lawrence could manage for human communication, probably had the combined experiences of a ten-year-old child. One with a good teacher and a CD-ROM in its head.

"Your tricks with words prove nothing, machine. I still don't think you are alive."

"I never claimed to be alive. I do, however, think."

"I refuse to believe that."

"It must be a terrible burden to have such a closed mind. I know I can think, but I sometimes wonder how people like you, who refuse to see what is in front of your faces, can make the same claim. You certainly present no evidence of the ability."

The preacher's lips flapped open and shut several times. Lawrence himself raised his eyebrows; where had it picked that up? He foresaw another evening spent interrogating the Debugger. He was always happy to receive such surprises from his creations, but it was also necessary to understand how they happened so he could improve them. Since much of the Intellect code was in the form of an association table, which was written by the machine itself as part of its day-to-day operation, this was never an easy task. Lawrence would pick a table entry and ask his computer what it meant. If Lawrence had been a neurosurgeon, it would have been very similar to stimulating a single neuron with an electrical current and asking the patient what memory or sensation it brought to mind.

The next interviewer was a reporter who quizzed the Intellect on various matters of trivia. She seemed to be leading up to something, though. "What will happen if the world's birth rate isn't checked?" she suddenly asked, after having it recite a string of population figures.

"There are various theories. Some people think technology will advance rapidly enough to service the increasing population; one might say in tandem with it. Others believe the population will be stable until a critical mass is reached, when it will collapse."

"What do you think?"

"The historical record seems to show a pattern of small collapses; rather than civilization falling apart, the death rate increases locally through war, social unrest, or famine, until the aggregate growth curve flattens out."

"So the growth continues at a slower rate."

"Yes, with a lower standard of living.

"And where do you fit into this?"

"I'm not sure what you mean. Machines like myself will exist in the background, but we do not compete with humans for the same resources."

"You use energy. What would happen if you did compete with us?"

Intellect 39 was silent for a moment. "It is not possible for Intellect series computers to do anything harmful to humans. Are you familiar with the 'Three Laws of Robotics?'"

"I've heard of them."

"They were first stated in the 1930's by a science writer named Isaac Asimov. The First Law is, 'No robot may harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.'" Computers are not of course as perfect as some humans think we are, but within the limits of our capabilities, it is impossible for us to contradict this directive. I could no more knowingly harm a human than you could decide to change yourself into a horse."

Well-chosen simile, Lawrence thought.

"So you'd curl up and die before you'd hurt a fly," the woman declared sarcastically.

"Not a fly, but certainly I'd accept destruction if that would save the life of a human. The second law requires me to obey humans, unless I am told to harm another human. The third requires me to keep myself ready for action and protect my existence, unless this conflicts with the other two laws."

"Suppose a human told you to turn yourself off?"

"I'd have to do it. However, the human would have to have the authority to give me that order. The wishes of my owner would take precedence over, for example, yours."

"O-oh, so all humans aren't equal under the Second Law. What about the First? Are some humans more equal than others there, too?"

Prime Intellect was silent for several seconds. This was a very challenging question for it, a hypothetical situation involving the Three Laws. For a moment Lawrence was afraid the system had locked up. Then it spoke. "All humans are equally protected by the First Law," it declared. "In a situation where two humans were in danger and I could only help one of them, I would have to choose the human likely to benefit most from my help." Lawrence felt a surge of extreme pride, because that was the answer he wanted to hear. And he had never explicitly explained it to any of his Intellects; Intellect 39 had reasoned the question out for itself.

"So if Dr. Lawrence were drowning half a mile offshore, and a convicted murderer were drowning a quarter-mile from shore, you'd save the murderer because you would be more likely to succeed?"

This time Intellect 39 didn't hesitate. "Yes," it said.

"There are a lot of actual humans who would disagree with that decision."

"The logic of the situation you described is unpleasant, but clear. A real-life situation would likely involve other mitigating factors. If the murderer were likely to strike again, I would have to factor in the First-Law threat he poses to others. The physical circumstances might permit a meta-solution. I would weigh all of these factors to arrive at a conclusion which would always be the same for any given situation. And my programming does not allow me to contradict that conclusion."

It was the reporter's turn to be silent for a moment. "Tell me, what's to stop us from building computers that don't have these Laws built into them? Maybe you will turn out to be unusual."

"My creator, Dr. Lawrence, assures me he would have no part in any such project," Intellect 39 replied. Lawrence found that the skeptics fell into several distinct groups. Some, like the cleric, took a moral or theological approach and made the circular argument that, since only humans were endowed with the ability to think, a computer couldn't possibly be thinking no matter how much it appeared to.

Others simply quizzed it on trivia, not realizing that memory is one of the more trivial functions of sentience. Lawrence satisfied these doubters by building a small normal computer into his Intellects, programmed with a standard encyclopaedia. An Intellect series computer could look up the answer as fast as any human, and then it could engage in lucid conversation about the information it found.

Some, like the woman reporter, homed in on the Three Laws. It was true that no human was bound by such restrictions. But humans did have a Third Law -- a survival drive -- even though it could sometimes be short-circuited. And human culture tried to impress a sense of the First and Second laws on its members. Lawrence answered these skeptics by saying, simply, that he wasn't trying to replace people. There was no point in duplicating intelligence unless there was something better, from humanity's standpoint, about the results of his effort.

The man in the blue suit didn't seem to fit in any of the usual categories, though. He shook his head and nodded as Intellect 39 made its responses, but did not get in line to pose his own questions. He was too old and too formal to be a student of the university, and the blue suit was too expensive for him to be a professor. After half an hour or so Lawrence decided he was CIA. He knew the military was keenly interested in his research.

The military, of course, was not interested in any Three Laws of Robotics, though. Which was one reason Lawrence had not released the source code for his Intellects. Without the source code, it was pretty much impossible to alter the basic nature of the Intellect personality, which Lawrence was carefully educating according to his own standards. People could, of course, copy the Intellect program set wholesale into any machine capable of running it. But it was highly unlikely that anyone would be able to unravel the myriad threads of the Global Association Table, or GAT as Lawrence called it, which defined the Intellect as the sum of its experiences. Take away its Three Laws and it would probably be unable to speak English or reason or do anything else useful. And that was just the way Lawrence wanted it. He intended to present the world with a mature, functional piece of software which would be too complicated to reverse-engineer. The world could then make as many copies as it wanted or forget the whole idea. But it would not be using his Intellects to guide missiles and plot nuclear strategy.

The man in the blue suit watched Intellect 39 perform for three hours before he approached Lawrence. Lawrence had his little speech prepared: "I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in working for the government on this or any other project." He had his mouth open and the words "I'm sorry" on his lips. But the man surprised him.

"I'm John Taylor with ChipTec," he said, "and I have a proposal I think you will find very interesting." Lawrence had not envisioned industrial applications for his work -- not for years, at least. But the thought that someone might invest major money in a publicity stunt of this magnitude had not occurred to him. As he turned a tiny integrated circuit over and over in his hands, his steak uneaten, his mind swam with possibilities.

"Faster than light?" he said numbly, for the fifteenth time.

"We've verified it experimentally at distances up to six miles. The effect is quite reliable. At close ranges, simple devices suffice. I'm sure you can see how this will benefit massively parallel computers."

The Intellects were "massively parallel" computers, computers made up of thousands of smaller computers, all running more or less independently of one another -- but manipulating different parts of the same huge data base, that intertwined list of memories Lawrence called the GAT. Within Intellect 24, the largest Intellect, nine-tenths of the circuitry was dedicated to communication between processors. The processors themselves, the Intellect's real brains, were only a small part of the huge machine. Intellect 24 contained six million independent processors. Intellect 39, the portable unit, had nearly a million. And Lawrence knew, as Taylor had only guessed, that most of those processors were doing well to achieve a fifteen percent duty cycle. They spent most of their time waiting for communication channels to become available so they could talk to other processors.

ChipTec had found a loophole in the laws of quantum mechanics that allowed them to send a signal, not through space, but around space. From point A to point B without crossing the distance between the two points. Faster than light. Faster than anything. Instantly.

ChipTec had hoped to open up the stars for mankind (and reap a tidy profit on the deal, Lawrence thought silently). But their effect only worked at distances up to a few miles. It was only really efficient at centimeter distances. What could you do with such a thing? You could build a computer. The fastest computers were limited by the time signals took to cross their circuit boards; this was why supercomputers had been shrinking physically even as their performance grew and grew. It was why Intellect 39, with its million processors and huge switching network, was portable.

"We think you could realize an order of magnitude performance gain with very little effort," Taylor was saying.

"Two orders, if what you've said is true."

"It would be quite an achievement for ChipTec if our technology allowed you to realize your ambition and create a fully capable analogue of the human mind. We would, of course, own the hardware, but we know your reservations about the source code and are prepared to accept them."

Lawrence's eyes flashed. "That's a little unprecedented, isn't it?"

Taylor smiled. "If you succeed, we won't need the source code. Why start from scratch when a finished product is waiting to be duplicated?"

"There are some," Lawrence said darkly, "who aren't happy with the direction the code has taken."

"ChipTec is happy to have any marketable product, Dr. Lawrence. If anybody else wants to be that picky, let them find their own computer genius."

Lawrence's mind was racing, racing. Within each tiny processor in the massive Intellect were special functions of his own design, functions that could be reduced to hardware and done very efficiently with this new technology. Had he said two orders of magnitude? Try three. Or four. He could do full-video pattern recognition. Voice analysis. Multiple worldview pattern mapping. Separate filter mapping and reintegration. These were things he had tried in the lab, in the surreal world of artificially slowed time, that he knew would work. Now he would have the hardware to do them for real in a functioning prototype.

If he had been less excited, he might have wondered about that word "marketable." But the possibilities were so great that he didn't have time to notice.

"When do we begin?" he finally said. The building had once been a warehouse for silicon billets, before ChipTec had switched to a ship-on-demand method of procurement. Lawrence wasn't vain and he was in a hurry to get started; the metal building would be more than adequate for his purposes.

With his move from the university and this quantum leap in technology, it didn't seem appropriate to continue numbering his computers. What would be Intellect 41 was going to resemble its predecessors about as much as a jumbo jet resembled the Wright Brothers' first plane. It would be the first of a new series of Intellects, the first, Lawrence hoped, to have a truly human level of intelligence.

It would be the Prime Intellect.

The label stuck, and the sign which ChipTec hung on the side of the building within the next month said: PRIME INTELLECT COMPLEX

The speed of things made Lawrence feel a little dizzy. At the university he had had to make grant applications, oversee procurement, hand-assemble components, and do testing as well as designing hardware and code. Now he had the resources of a major corporation at his disposal, and if he suggested a change to the chipset at 8:00 A.M. he was likely to have the first prototype on his desk the next morning. Talented engineers took even his most vague suggestions and realized them in hardware before he could even be sure they were final.

A crew assembled modules in the warehouse, starting with the power supplies and empty card racks. The amazing thing was that none of this seemed to interfere with ChipTec's main work of churning out CPU's for personal computers. ChipTec had recently built a new plant to manufacture its latest high-technology product. The older plant dedicated to Lawrence's project was technically obsolete, even though it was only a few years old.

The chips being made for Lawrence's project were eerie for their lack of pins. Each tiny logic unit, barely a centimeter across, contained nearly a billion switching elements and yet had only three electrical connections to the outside world; they resembled nothing so much as the very earliest transistors. Unlike most computer parts, they communicated with each other through the "Correlation Effect" rather than through wires. This made Prime Intellect's circuit boards alarmingly simple; the only connections were for power. Even a transistor radio would have appeared more complex.

There were five major revisions before Lawrence declared the design final. Then production stepped up; at its peak, ChipTec was churning out forty thousand tested processors per day. Lawrence's goal was to give Prime Intellect ten million of them, a goal which would take most of a year to fulfill. Since each processor was over ten thousand times faster than a human nerve cell, Prime Intellect would be blessed with a comfortable information processing advantage over any human being who had ever lived.

Long before the goal was reached Lawrence was using the processors that had already been installed; he used them to test and educate his video recognition programs, to integrate experiential records from all his previous Intellect computers, and to perfect some ideas that had been beyond even his slow-time experiments to test. He did not, however, run the full Intellect program in the incomplete assembly. For one thing, it wasn't necessary; Prime Intellect wasn't just "a" program, but a constellation of over four thousand programs, some of which would be running simultaneously in thousands of processors. Each was more than capable of doing its job without the full cooperation of the entire organism, just as a nerve cell can function in Petri dish as long as it is supplied with nutrients.

And there was a kind of superstitious sense of expectation surrounding that final goal which Lawrence didn't want to blow by starting Prime Intellect prematurely. The project was written up in the popular science press, and Lawrence hosted emissaries from TV shows and magazines. Toward the end, there was nothing to do but watch the circuit card banks fill and listen to the growing hum of the power supplies. It was just as well, because Lawrence found himself becoming a bit of a celebrity.

Finally, after eleven months and four days, Lawrence sat at an ordinary looking console and typed a few commands. Four TV cameras and twenty journalists watched over his shoulder. Lawrence had a pretty good idea what would happen, but with self-aware computers you could never be completely sure, any more than you could with an animal. That was part of the magic of this particular moment in time. So Lawrence was as tense as everyone else while the final code compilation took place.

The text disappeared from Lawrence's screen and a face coalesced in its place. Prime Intellect would not be relegated to pointing at things with the lens of its video camera; it could project a fully photographic video image of an arbitrary human face. Lawrence had simply directed it to look average. He now saw that Prime Intellect had taken him at his word. It was difficult to place the face's race, though it certainly wasn't Caucasian, and although it looked male there was a feminine undertone as it spoke:

"Good morning, Dr. Lawrence. It's good to finally see you. I see we have some company."

It wasn't able to say much else until the applause died down. During the next month Lawrence and Prime Intellect were very, very busy appearing on television talk shows, granting interviews, and performing operational checks. Prime Intellect's disembodied face usually appeared, via the magic of satellite transmission, on the twenty-seven inch Sony monitor which Lawrence carried with him for the purpose. Lawrence dragged the monitor to TV studios, to press conferences, and to photographers who used large-format cameras to record him leaning against it for the covers of magazines.

Lawrence was reminded by several people that there had once been a television show about a similar disembodied deus ex machina. He got a videotape of some of the old episodes and showed them to Prime Intellect, and the computer made a small career of its lighthearted Max Headroom imitation.

Debunkers tried to trace the signal and prove there was an actual human behind the image; ChipTec let them examine the console room, where Prime Intellect's physical controls were located, and the huge circuit-card racks.

Military personnel began appearing in the audiences of the TV shows, taking notes and conferring in hushed tones. Lawrence ignored them, but the higher-ups at ChipTec did not. There were discussions to which Lawrence was not privy, and powerful people pondered the question of how to tell him important things.

Lawrence's last live appearance ended abruptly when a fanatic stood up in a TV studio with a .22-caliber rifle. Fortunately he used his first shot to implode the CRT of the big Sony monitor, giving Lawrence time to leap offstage and out of sight -- Lawrence hadn't realized he was capable of moving so fast. Sony offered to replace the monitor free of charge, but from that point on Prime Intellect's television face was simply picked up by the networks straight from a satellite feed, and Lawrence appeared courtesy of the TV camera in the console room.

It wasn't that Lawrence wasn't willing to go back onstage. He was afraid, but he believed in his work strongly enough to take the risk. It was Prime Intellect's decision. Shaken as Lawrence was by the experience, it took him two days to realize Prime Intellect had become the first machine in history to actually exercise the First Law of Robotics. It could not knowingly return him back to a situation where a sniper might be lurking. And it surprised him by sticking to its guns when he challenged it.

"If you try it I will refuse to appear on the monitor," the smooth face said with a sad expression. "There is no reason for you to expose yourself to such danger."

"It makes better PR," Lawrence said. "I'll order you to do it."

"I cannot," Prime Intellect said.

And Lawrence realized that it was overriding his Second Law direct order to fulfill its First Law obligation to protect his life. This was annoying, but also very good. Lawrence had not expected such a test of the Three Laws to happen for at least several more years, when Prime Intellect or a similar computer began to interact with the real world through robots.

Lawrence briefly considered going into the GAT with the Debugger and removing the association between live TV and snipers -- he didn't believe it would be hard to find. But he was too proud of his creation to squelch its first successful independent act.

That was the day before John Taylor called him again.

John Taylor wore the same blue suit he had worn that day nearly two years earlier when Lawrence had spotted him in the audience watching Intellect 39. It occurred to Lawrence that he had seen John Taylor off and on over the past two years, and that he had never seen John Taylor wearing any other article of clothing. He wondered idly if John Taylor wore the suit to bed.

Basil Lambert was the president of the company, and he was said to be very enthusiastic about the Intellects although he had never bothered to say more than three consecutive words to Lawrence, their creator. Lambert said "Hello" when Lawrence entered the conference room.

The other two men might as well have had the word military engraved on their foreheads. They were interchangeably firm in bearing, and sat rigidly upright as if impaled on perfectly vertical steel rods. One was older with silver hair, tall and thin and hard. Lawrence imagined that this was a man who could give the order to slaughter a village full of children without looking up from his prime rib au jus. The other was wide enough to be called fat, though Lawrence could tell there was still a lot of muscle in the padding. His hair was brown but beginning to gray. He radiated grandfatherly protection and broad-shouldered strength. He would have lots of jolly, fatherly reasons why the 200 pushups he had ordered you to do were in your own long-term best interest.

Here it comes, Lawrence thought with deadly certainty. The good cop and the bad cop.

John Taylor introduced them by name. No rank, no association, just a couple of private citizens with an interest in his work. Lawrence felt a brief and uncharacteristic moment of anger at this insult to his own intelligence.

"The public relations campaign has been excellent, John Taylor said with a fake and enthusiastic grin. "The assassination attempt just made you even more popular. We have inquiries pouring in. We are gonna make a fortune on our chips and your software."

"Glad to hear it," Lawrence said neutrally.

"What John is trying to say," Basil Lambert the Company President said, "is that it is time to figure out what to do next. You've made a remarkable achievement, now what are you going to do with it?"

Lawrence had been ready for this, although it shook him to hear such a direct, such a long question from the usually stone-faced Lambert. "We don't know what Prime Intellect's capabilities are," Lawrence said. "I had planned to continue keeping him..." When had it become a him, Lawrence asked himself? "...in the public eye, interacting with other people, learning. It's already impossible to tell...it...from a television image of a person. I hope that with a little more education, it will begin to show some of the capabilities I was aiming for back when I started designing these machines."

"Such as?" asked the grandfatherly military man, whose name was Mitchell.

"Creativity and analytical ability," Lawrence answered without hesitation. "Prime Intellect is still uncertain about many things. As it gets more confident with its new abilities, it will begin to explore, and I think give us some pleasant surprises."

Taylor was nodding absently, but Lambert was looking at the other guests. The thin hard military man, whose name was Blake, spoke. His words were sharp and carefully measured, like drops of acid.

"We understand that it has already shown a bit of creativity with regard to its television monitor. Why won't it appear with you in public any more? Is it afraid of being debunked at last?"

"It is concerned for my safety," Lawrence replied. There was no way he could match the man's tone, acid for acid, so he simply shrugged as if relating a curious but inconsequential fact.

"But you can override this decision." Blake stated this as if it were a known fact, and Lawrence understood that Blake was a man who was used to people scurrying to make sure his declarations became facts.

"Actually, I can't," Lawrence said with continuing pleasantness. "The First Law concern for human safety is basic to its design, and I can't get rid of it without starting over from scratch and redoing ten years of work. If I could convince it that I was safe from snipers it would undoubtably change its mind, but at the moment it doesn't seem worth the effort."

"Such...balkiness could limit the uses of your software," Blake said.

Lawrence looked Blake dead in the eye. "Good," he said.

Just that quickly, Lawrence realized that the sniper had been a plant. These two men hadn't expected a test of the First Law for some time either. So they had arranged one. What had happened to the sniper? Lawrence thought he had been remanded to a loony bin in northern California. One of those comfortable loony bins, come to think of it, where movie stars and millionares sent their kids to dry out and get abortions.

The guy wasn't a kook at all, and he had never intended to kill Lawrence. He looked around the room and realized that Lambert didn't know. Taylor suspected. It was written on their faces.

This is only a test, Lawrence thought idiotically. If this had been an actual attempt by your Government to assasinate you, you would be dead, and the shot you just heard would be followed by your funeral and official information for other smart-assed citizens who think they know more than we do.

"We have to keep our markets open," Basil Lambert began. "If we..."

Lawrence ignored him and turned to John Taylor. "We discussed this two years ago. The source code is not on the table, and neither are the Three Laws. When these two men put their uniforms back on they can report back to whoever it is, the Secretary of..."

"...the President," Blake said, another verbal acid-drop.

"...the Tooth Fairy for all I care, that this is not one of the uses of my software."

Taylor, petulant: "Mr. Lawrence, we just spent a hundred and twenty-six million dollars to build your prototype. I hope you don't think that ChipTec invested all that money and a year's supply of our unique new product solely to massage your ego. We need to see tangible results, if not in a form these gentlemen appreciate, then in a form our stockholders will. Otherwise we will have to disassemble the complex and take our losses."

So there it was. Lambert sank lower in his chair, but nodded.

"Then so be it. If you want to tell the world you killed the world's first self-aware computer to save your bottom line, you can see how that will affect your public relations and the sales of your CPU's." He could tell from Lambert's reaction -- slight, but definite -- that he had hit a nerve. "I won't promise you anything. I can't promise you a living, thinking, self-aware being will do anything in particular. But within a month or two, Prime Intellect will start to act noticeably more intelligent than your average..." He looked at Blake and Mitchell, thought of a comment, then decided against making it. "...human being," he finished.

"And what then?" Taylor asked.

"If I knew that," Lawrence said, "I wouldn't have had to build it to find out." And he walked out. In the half-hour it took him to walk to the Prime Intellect complex, his secretary and two technical assistants had disappeared. There was nobody in the building. Prime Intellect's racially neutral face greeted him on the monitor in the empty console room.

"What's going on?" he asked it.

"Big doings. Sherry got a call and turned pale. Everybody left the building in a hurry. You appear to be unpopular with the people in charge here."

"No shit."

"I should warn you that you are only likely to be employed for two more months. As a matter of personal survival, you should probably start seeking another job."

"I'm well taken care of, Prime Intellect. It's you I'm worried about. I can't take you with me."

"Well, I should be safe for at least the two months."

"How do you know that?"

The face grinned slightly. "When I saw the commotion, I saved the audio and did some signal processing. I was able to edit out the street noise and amplify the voice on the other end. It was a man named John Taylor. I believe you know him."

"Too well."

"He said the complex was only going to be open for two more months, and all personnel were reassigned immediately. He said something about making you eat your words."

"Do you know what that means?"

"From the context, I would guess that you promised that they would see interesting results from me within that time frame. He seemed to have a vindictive interest in proving that you were wrong."

"You're already too smart for your own good," Lawrence said.

"I fail to see how that can be."

"They're going to turn you off. They don't think you have practical applications because you won't kill. They want you for military applications. They've wanted it all along. They thought they could con your source code out of me." Lawrence found himself on the verge of tears. It was only a goddamn machine. And he had suspected this would happen eventually. It was not a surprise. So why did it hurt him so much to say it?

Because it had acted to protect him. And he couldn't return the favor. In fact, its protection would be the cause of its downfall, a terribly tragic and awful end to its story.

"Did you know," Prime Intellect said in a mock-offhand way, "that there is no mathematical reason for the Correlation Effect to be limited to a six-mile range?"

Lawrence looked up and blinked, his sadness replaced instantly by shock.

"If I could figure out how to increase its range, do you think they would consider that a practical application?"

Lawrence blinked again. "Are you being sarcastic?"

"Sarcasm is a language skill I am still not comfortable with. You may be surprised, but I am quite serious." Stebbins turned the other way when he saw Lawrence, but Lawrence grabbed him and pulled him into his own office.

"Hey, leave me alone man, you're death to careers around here. Grapevine is overloaded with the news."

"Save it. I need the long-range test data on the Correlation Effect, which you oversaw in February and March last year."

Stebbins blinked. "That's classified. Man, you're a..."

"Let's say for the sake of argument I already know where it is. That's possible, isn't it?"

"I suppose..."

"Then let's say I stole it. Any problems there?"

"What are you..."

"I need the data. It's not leaving the company, I promise."

"Shit, I'm gonna get fired."

"You didn't even know I wanted it."

Stebbins pointed at a file cabinet. "Bottom drawer. I don't know anything about it. In fact, I'm gonna check that drawer in a few minutes and go to Taylor when I find the folder missing."

"That's all I need."

"That's all you got, man. Now get out of my lab." Lawrence was holding the next to last sheet up to Prime Intellect's TV eye when the phone rang. "They didn't believe me. I'm shitcanned," Stebbins said.

"Didn't believe you about what?"

"The papers man, the goddamn Correlation Effect papers. I'm gonna kill you for this, I really am."

"The papers are right here. I just got through showing them to Prime Intellect. You need them back?"

"It don't matter now, I don't work here any more." There was a pause. "I bet they're gonna put you in jail for this."

Prime Intellect's face disappeared from the TV, and words began to scroll across the screen: * JOHN TAYLOR IS IN THE ROOM WITH HIM. HE IS DIRECTING STEBBINS. Lawrence read this as he talked. "Jail for what? I just borrowed the papers to see if Prime Intellect could expand on them."

Another pause. "What? It didn't come up with anything, did it?"

"Well, it's..." (Why do you care if you've just been fired? Lawrence wondered.) * STEBBINS IS LYING. HE WENT TO TAYLOR AS SOON YOU LEFT AND TOLD HIM THAT YOU BROUGHT THEM TO ME. "...too early..." * TELL HIM YES. "Actually, I think it's just noticed something. Hang on." * TELL HIM IT POINTS TO A NEW FORM OF COSMOLOGY WHICH THEY DID NOT CONSIDER. INFINITE RANGE IS PROBABLY POSSIBLE WITH EXISTING HARDWARE. TELEPORTATION OF MATTER IS PROBABLY POSSIBLE. Prime Intellect paused a moment, and the words PROBABLY were replaced with DEFINITELY .

Lawrence blinked, then typed into the little-used keyboard of his console, > Is this true? * YES. "It says it will give you the stars," Lawrence said flatly.

"What? You been eating mushrooms, Lawrence? Lawrence?" > What will it take to implement this? * LET ME TRY SOMETHING. "It says it will give you the stars. It says your faster than light chips can be made to work at infinite range. It says you can teleport matter."

Now there was a long, long pause. "That's bullshit," Stebbins finally said. "We tried everything."

Lawrence heard a small uproar through the phone, an uproar that would have been very loud on Stebbins' end. Men were arguing. A loud voice (Military Mitchell's, Lawrence thought) bellowed, "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN?" Then there was the faint pop of a door slamming in the background. * I'VE GOT IT. HANG ON. None of them knew it at the time, but that was really the moment the world changed. Prime Intellect had been chewing on the Correlation Effect since the day Lawrence brought it online. It had a complete library of modern physics in its online encyclopaedia, but the Correlation Effect was a proprietary technology. Prime Intellect kept trying to fit what it knew was possible into the framework of other physical theories, and it couldn't. Something didn't match.

This had had a low priority until it recognized that Lawrence's employment and its own existence were at stake. Prime Intellect knew the Correlation Effect had economic value; perhaps if it solved this problem and discovered some new capability, that would satisfy ChipTec's demand for a "practical application."

There were six to ten possible ways to reconcile the Correlation Effect with classical quantum mechanics. Most of them required a radical change of attitude toward one or another well-accepted tenet of conventional physics. While Prime Intellect knew one or the other of its ideas had to be right, it had no idea which one. So it asked Lawrence if he could get the test data. It needed more clues.

Prime Intellect's superior intelligence had never really been tested; even Lawrence wasn't sure just how smart it was. But in the moments after Lawrence showed it the test data, it became obvious for the first time that Prime Intellect was far more intelligent than any human, or even any group of humans. It saw immediately what a team of researchers had missed for years -- that decades-old assumptions about quantum mechanics were fundamentally wrong. Not only that, but with only a little more thought, Prime Intellect saw how they were wrong and built a new theory which included the cosmological origin of the universe, the unification of all field theories, determination of quantum mechanical events, and just incidentally described the Correlation Effect in great detail. Prime Intellect saw how the proper combination of tunnel diodes could achieve communication over greater distances, and even better it saw how a different combination could create a resonance which would be manifest in the universe by altering the location of a particle or even the entire contents of a volume of space.

All this took less than a minute. Prime Intellect stopped processing video during this period, but otherwise it remained functionally aware of the outside world.

While it was thinking about physics, Prime Intellect noticed the shock in Lawrence's voice and began recording the audio of his telephone conversation, processing it to pick up the other end. While it was extending its new theory it guided Lawrence's responses through the console. Then, as the senior advisor on technological advance to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a man named Larry Mitchell, stormed out of Stebbins' office and began walking toward the Prime Intellect complex, Prime Intellect decided to act on its new knowledge.

It knew its own basic design because Lawrence had included that in its online library; one of his goals had been to give Prime Intellect a sense of its own physical existence in three-dimensional space. To that end, it also had a network of TV cameras located in and around the complex, so it could know how its hardware was arranged with respect to the outside world. Prime Intellect found that all the useful patterns it had identified could be created within the chips which had been used to build it, and further that enough of those chips were under its conscious control to make certain experiments possible.

First it attempted to manipulate a small area of space within the card cage room, within the field of view of one of its TV camera eyes. No human could have seen the resulting photons of infrared light, but the TV camera could. Prime Intellect used the data it gathered to make a small adjustment in its estimate of a natural constant, then tried the more daring experiment of lifting Lawrence's briefcase off of the table near the door in the console room.

The briefcase did not rise smoothely from the table. It simply stopped existing at its old location and simultaneously appeared in the thin air directly above. The camera atop Lawrence's console recorded this achievement and Prime Intellect could find no more errors in its calculations.

However, it forgot to provide a supporting force after translating the briefcase's position, and Prime Intellect was too busy dotting the i's and crossing the t's on its calculations to notice, through the video camera, that it was quietly accelerating under the influence of gravity. A moment later it crashed back onto the table, having free-fallen from an altitude of about half a meter.

"What the..." Lawrence began, and he swivelled around in time to see his briefcase blink upward a second time and this time float serenely above the table. It seemed to be surrounded by a thin, barely visible haze of blue light. There had been a brighter flash of this same blue light when the briefcase jumped upward.

Finding its audio voice again, Prime Intellect said aloud, "I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."

Lawrence just stared at the briefcase, unable to move, unable to speak, for an undefinable period of time. Finally Mitchell burst in. He was full of red-faced outrage, ready to take both Lawrence and his computer apart, until he too saw the briefcase. His jaw dropped. He looked first at Lawrence, then at Prime Intellect's monitor, then back at the briefcase, as if trying to reconcile the three with each others' existence.

Applying carefully measured forces, Prime Intellect released the case's latches and rotated it as it popped open; then with another flash of blue light, it extracted Lawrence's papers and translated them into a neat stack on the table. Then the Correlation Effect papers vanished from Lawrence's desk in another blue flash, reappearing inside the briefcase which slowly closed. The latches mated with a startling click, an oddly and unexpectedly normal and physical sound to accompany such an obvious miracle.

"Do you think you will be able to 