I

In the morning I walk to the river to check my nets.

I like this. Trees rustle and clatter. The forest doesn't smell like information, or electricity. It smells like a real forest, which means, a little different each time.

It's another sleepy morning. I shake a trail of crumbs from my eyes. Some days I take my dreams with me on this walk, riddling the woods with robots, filling all the gaps with ghouls. Or else I fantasize more favorably: sometimes, times like today I guess, I almost believe that the trees fall away, and as I'm standing by the river, that a face rises out of the water and speaks to me, calling, "Dom."

She's beautiful. I always imagine she's someone I knew a long time ago, and lost, that I loved and that loved me just at different times, except there's no such person. But that's how I imagine her.

"Dom," she says -- she still calls me Dom? -- "You've got to stop living in this dream world. There's a whole other world out there. There's a world with crazy atoms and human hands. I miss you Dom. You've been lost a long time."

Sometimes I let her say, "I love you, Dom."

Then I imagine me taking up a superhero pose -- chin up, clenched hands at my waist, elbows jutting out as the handles to my body, the cup of righteousness -- and there's me saying in a voice deeper than my own, "No." There's me saying, "I have changed. I am at peace here."

Her face contorts, is shivered with tears, and the tears become the water and flow away with the rest of the scramble, all the bits and pieces of fragmented waste data, destined for that whirlpool of deletion at the center of this Yellow Book, the wondrous wastelands of the great Milieu.

Some superhero. Sneaking out with Batman to smoke kryptonite, I'd be. But it's a nice dream.

II

A silver flash here and there, the trees thin, I catch my first glance of the river. The noise I hear, which will barely increase in volume as I approach, is the quiet bubbling static of a book. The noise is grossly disproportionate to the size of the river. I walk out onto the bank. Grass. Moist. The sky is high and steely and featureless.

The river is swiftly-flowing pond scum and little jello mermaids and molten scissors and herds of tinsel, yes, and water: pool water all deadly poison with the chlorine, sea water all salty with the sailors (and filled with severed hands in little plastic bags), underground water still shaking off the darkness, black and swift. The river ripples. It waves. It rushes. The water is a good three or four feet higher near the center. Touching it is dangerous; I've already lost two fingers from carelessness.

I've laid eight nets across its back. Look closely and you'll see the code for the nets, designed not to lose anchor in the torrent of waste data, to search and retrieve what they can, to rummage through others' garbage in search gold. My nets search maybe 0.1% of what passes through here. Of that maybe 0.1% is useful. Of that only an infinitesimal amount can my nets actually retrieve. The rest washes on. The rest dies. There are no other nets in the Yellow Book but mine.

As far as I know, in all the caves and forests and hills and swamps, there are no other inhabitants in the Yellow Book but me.

But there should be a fish here, the nearest thing the Yellow Book has to a second inhabitant, the nearest thing I have to company, and the nearest thing I have to a family member, hovering some distance above my livelihood keeping watch. There isn't. I gaze upstream, towards distant rapids. I gaze downstream. Something must have scared the fish.

I come closer, kneel down and tug a net. The contents spill out onto the ground before me: mostly indecipherable scramble. A three-inch woman rises from the middle of it, talking but no sound. That happens a lot: I keep a lip-reader program back at the cave. I pocket the woman. I sift through the scramble.

Net number two. Some comprehensible code spills out amongst the scramble, this time in the form of sea-shells. Hard and dirty and covered with scratches and scrawls. Probably don't do anything. People usually only delete things when they're broken.

I tug my third net.

III

It's about the size of a clenched fist, dark green and amphibian, with six legs and a single bulging eye. I grab for it, but it slides through my fingers and hops behind me, away from the river. It stops at the edge of the forest, and regards me.

It blinks, once.

It speaks, a slippery, sighing noise, addressing me as Dom Drane Back-up. "Dom Drane Back-up," it sighs. "You died at 6:15 this morning. Please report immediately to the office of Omni-5-ysp at the Almost Cemetery, where you will be restored to life. You will not be charged for this service. Enclosed, for your convenience, is a shortcut to the Almost Cemetery. Thank you."

The eye pops out of its socket and rolls towards me. It lies there on the grass, large and wet, its dark pupil pointing at the sky. Then it starts sinking into the grass, and the pupil begins to expand, until all that's left is a hole in the ground, about three feet wide, neatly rimmed with white.

"Be happy to go," I say. It's very strange to hear myself speaking. I haven't spoken in months, speaking to yourself is a sign of excessive eccentricity, and I am not an eccentric. But my voice is stranger than the messenger's, all soft and croaky. "How," I say, a little clearer, "uh, how did I die?"

"Enclosed, for your convenience, is a shortcut to the Almost Cemetery."

The empty eye-socket is a dark and bloody red. Someone had a lot of fun animating this one.

"What were you doing in my scramble net?"

"If you have any queries," it sighs, "you should report to the office of Omni-5-ysp at the Almost Cemetery."

I step closer. I peer over the edge of the hole, finding darkness and indeterminable depth. I walk round the edge, and squat next to the messenger. I take it gingerly in my hands and stand up. It doesn't try to hop away. I squeeze, it bursts, sending intestinal code spurting over the green grass.

I sift through the scramble with my toe. No moment, so no true intelligence, no animating spirit. Just a regular computer program. Bringing me a message. I scoop up the remains and throw them in the river.

IV

I walk downstream. The river is on my right side now, and the woods are on my left, as dark and inconstant as ever. There all the soft and woody things are gathered into tree trunks: the skins of animals, crumbling books, earthworms, warm wet chocolate. Trees walk on the edges of my sight, becoming still in guilty poses whenever I look directly at them. I think the Yellow Book is short on material for the forest, because the higher up and the further along you go the more artificial the animation is. The branches are all metal. They sway and clink. A wheelchair. A pram. Knives and forks: twigs.

But for the first time in months, the concealed motion, and all the soft wicked noises, actually agitate me. I keep trying to match the noises -- a rustle, a scrape, a grinding of invisible teeth -- to the shadows with their curious eyes. I search the darkness at my left, then jerk my head, glimpsing something in the flow of the river. Then I stop walking and listen: rustle, scrape, grind, heartbeat. Then I walk on. Then I stop. Then I walk on. My neck and shoulders prickle.

The sun is still digital and bright, but the situation's changed. They say that in the Yellow Book, the landscape may swell into strange sunflowers and devour passers-by, intrepid explorers and humble Fisherfolk alike. It's been those legends, those frenzied, fearful tales of the Yellow Book ghosts, that have kept me safe and alone for all these months. Or else it's been the ghosts themselves, watching over me, with mouths of softly grinding teeth and limbs of sunflower and swords of scissor. Maybe they don't like the way I taste. If it is true, what they say about the Yellow Book, then it's a mystery to me why I am still alive, which I think I am, in a sense.