“Fashion, huh?”
<It seems a primate preoccupation. Augmenting yourselves with baubles.>
“Hey, you stick on an extra eye or leg fast as I can change my shirt.”
<You seldom change it.>
“Hey! I forget, sure, but—”
<It is not the same.>
Toby didn’t see why, but he felt something in Quath’s manner that made him uneasy. “Why come looking for me, mother of all cockroaches?”
<Your father has finished his trading. Now, to complete his own ends, he needs one thing more.>
Toby kicked at a fallen branch. “Should I care? Let him sell his teeth for it.”
<The important piece only you have.>
“Me? I haven’t got anything.”
<You carry a Personality.>
“Sure, but—say, what’s my dad been negotiating?”
<They have a different way of death here. An institution known as the Restorer, or the Preserving Machine. With a tissue sample and a memory reserve, it can recreate any person who once lived.>
Toby felt cold, sharp horror strike into him. “Shibo.”
<Yes.>
“I don’t like that.”
<I would think it was an issue for the persona herself.>
Toby blushed. He tottered, reeled—and sat down abruptly, head swimming. The air swarmed with blue-white dots. His chest heaved to drag in thick, moist gasps. He knew what Killeen wanted was wrong in some dark, terrible way, but he could not muster arguments. “I . . . I don’t know.”
<If the Shibo persona is to be used to reconstruct the living actual person, I would imagine that her cooperation is necessary.>
“They’ll confer with her?”
<I believe so. But a Personality in a chip cannot speak.>
“Sure, it’ll have to be through me.”
His head pounded and his hands clenched, strangely cold, but he made himself think. He had only to turn his attention inward and Shibo’s Personality rose like a massive stony wedge inside his mind.
It is tempting to go back into all that. I will have to think about it.
“What?” he asked her soundlessly. “But we’re so close. I’ve hardly even started to learn what you’re really like. Your memories, I love them.”
They are digital dust.
“They’re just as real as, as this grass, those trees.”
You do not believe that. Remember the ones who fought the fake animals? They embraced the simulated over the real. You laughed at them.
“But your self, it’ll last forever in chipstore.” He was grasping at straws of logic and hoped she could not sense that.
Nothing replaces life. Still, there are flavors here that you do not taste. Hard to describe, gray and cool and restful.
Craftily he said to her, “Let’s get through this trouble, then talk about this so-called Restorer.”
There is some sense to that, I admit.
“Good. Just let me straighten things out with my dad, just you and me, and—”
I have been thinking. Such a transformation might not make for happiness in myself or in Killeen. He is changed. Harder.
“He is that.”
I treasure this remove. Here I am free of the coarse and momentary, of jars and needs.
Toby caught a sliver of pale spaces, strangely delicious, of smooth surfaces flowing in a timeless place. “I see.”
You cannot. But I thank you for trying.
He gulped, his hands trembling, and gazed defiantly up into Quath’s hovering head. “I . . . I won’t let Killeen have her chip.”
