• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1396 0

are inextricably caught in the embrace of the Web feel compelled to belittle it with their talk, even while they enjoy the wonderful privileges of its caresses, but it seems to be human nature to take the best things in life for granted.” “Rumor has it,” she had told him while inspecting his cradle and his collection of uncommon suitskins, “that the most realistic VEs of all don’t require a suitskin. The illusion is produced entirely by internal nanotech while the dreamer lies unconscious in a kind of susan. It’s said that the suite was never put on the market because the illusions were too convincing for some of its users.” “Actually, the system in question was made commercially available for a while,” Paul had been able to tell her, “but it was withdrawn after the first half-dozen shock-induced fatalities. An overreaction, in my opinion, but typical of the way the World Government works, always turning panic into legislation. All that was required was a slight tightening of the IT safety net, but the vidveg never see that, and democracy gives the vidveg the right of campaign. I’ve used the relevant IT myself, but work on the software stopped when the scandal forced the product off the market, and the existing VEs aren’t nearly as sophisticated as the best of those designed to run on equipment like mine. If the MegaMall ever puts it back on the market I’d certainly consider adapting my own work to that kind of system, but it would involve some heavy and exceedingly laborious work.

I’m probably too old for that kind of project.” “I doubt that,” she had said, with a brilliant smile. “You’ve worn better than any other two-hundred-year-old man I know.” He hadn’t even bothered to point out that he was still six years short of his second century.

By the time the door chime sounded, Paul was entirely ready to receive his visitor. He felt perfectly at home in his flesh, and perfectly at home in his apartment “Why thank you,” he said as she offered him a bouquet of golden flowers. “I think I have a vase, somewhere. Are they Wildes or Czastkas?” “Wildes,” she told him. “His latest release.” “Of course—I should have known. The style’s unmistakable. Czastkas always look so lackluster, so very natural— although I suppose we’ll have to give up calling things natural, now that the adjective’s been turned into a noun by the new emortals.” Paul did have a vase, although it wasn’t easy to find. He was not a man who liked clutter, and he kept the great majority of his possessions neatly and efficiently stored away. “My memory isn’t what it used to be,” he explained while he searched for it.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You can set them in the wall if you have the right kind of plumbing.” “I don’t,” he replied, still searching. “In my day, picture windows and virtual murals were all the rage. Nobody wanted creepers and daisy chains covering their interior walls—even daisy chains designed by Oscar Wilde or Walter Czastka. I was at university with Czastka, you know. He was so intense in those days—so full of plans and schemes. A little bit crazy, but only in a good way. He was an explorer uienj like me. Sometimes I wonder where all his daring went. I haven’t spoken to him for decades, but he’d become exceedingly dull even then.” “It really doesn’t matter about the vase,” the woman told him anxiously.

“It’s here somewhere,” he said. “I really ought to remember where I keep it. I might have thirty or forty years in me yet, if only I can keep my mind alive and alert. My brain might be a thing of thread and patches, but as long as I can keep the forces of fossilization at bay I can keep the neural pathways intact.

As long as I can look after my mind…” Paul realized that he was rambling. He shut up, wondering whether he could find an opportunity to ask her whether or not she was a Natural, engineered for such longevity that she might not ever need “rejuvenation.” If so, her mind might have a thousand years to grow and learn, to refine itself by the selection of forgetfulness. He wondered whether it would really be indelicate simply to ask