XVII

"Nimmet?" I say, in a lull in the conversation. "You a person? I mean, are you human, as opposed to robot, AI?"

"I don't see why it matters."

"It's just that I've been thinking of you as a robot, but I mean, you have a body attached somewhere, plugged into a terminal?"

There were a few seconds of silence. Then she says, "Okay, it's a bit of a strange situation." Then: "Actually, that's kind of --"

Finally, she says, "Look, at the moment, I'm not actually entirely certain, one way or the other."

"I'm sorry?"

"I used to be sure I was human. Then there was a time I was sure I wasn't. If I am human, I haven't been out of the Milieu in a very long time. I'm -- look, you have your problems, I have mine. My problems don't come into this."

"You're featuring pretty high on my list of problems at the moment, Nimmet."

"Yeah, well. I'm either a robot, with people around who want me to think I'm human, or a human, with people around who want me to think I'm a robot. My employers, I guess."

"Doesn't that piss you off?"

"They'll have my best interests in mind. If they're my employers."

"Mm."

"This is an attempt to side-track me. It's not as if I'm going to forget why I'm here and wander off seeking self-fulfilment."

"Here's a proposition. We talk about your problem. Maybe, if we combine forces, there's a way we can find out exactly what you are, and if it turns out you aren't human, Nimmet, you can take over my life. Really. I mean it."

"Who says I'd prefer to be human?"

"Yeah. Well, in that case, you can understand exactly where I'm coming from."

"What? No --"

"Think about it, Nimmet."

There were a few mumbled curse-words. Then silence. Then: "No. Look, this isn't a Goddamn group psychiatry session. I'm here to make you do what you don't want to do. My problems are my problems. One of them is -- that, and another one, that's you, and the sooner I have you out of the way, the sooner --"

"Would you at least tell me about it?"

"No." Nimmet suddenly springs to life, moving away from the camera I've been peering through for the past couple hours.

"Hey, where you going?"

The fish shakes slightly, and I almost fall out of my seat. I look through one of the smaller side windows. There's nothing, but then all of a sudden Nimmet's face is plastered up against it, grainy and colorless, and this time when the ground moves I do lose my balance, falling to me knees in front of the little window.

I'm seeing her up close for the first time. She's bitmapped and squashed, and she's got an expression of pure rage, but nonetheless I'm struck by a familiar feeling . . . well, it's a familiar face. Nimmet looks just like my dream girl, the one I always imagine rising out of the river in the mornings, the one that asks me to come back to the real world. Except big and flat.

"Hey, don't do that," I say. "You won't get in."

Nimmet backs away, leaving a thin trail of saliva and scramble on the window. "What exactly do you want, Dom?" she says. Then she charges my defenses again. The fish doesn't rock back and forwards quite so much, this time. I guess she's run out of power, or the fish has learnt how to deal with it. "Good fish," I murmur.

I can't find Nimmet on any of the cameras. I feel panicky for a moment, thinking she's gone. Then she speaks. "Dom, if you don't mind me saying, you're in a shit situation." She sounds very tired.

"Could you move a couple steps to your left, please?"

She ignores me. "You are a flawed copy, an interrupted operation, a delusional psychotechnical phenomenon that officially should not exist. You have no legal rights, and you're not in a particularly good position to judge what's good for you. You're probably very sick. You're probably deteriorating, going mad, without knowing it. You should have been hunted down and destroyed, but you got lucky, and now you're the closest living thing to Dom Drane. You'll get back your job, and if you weren't such a loser you'd be getting back money and friends too. Listen, Dom. Lassie's Sisters is a professional firm with a reputation to protect. We can get you out of there. I'm the nice way. After me, there are other ways. There are ugly ways. Dom? Are you listening to this?"

"Huh? I can't hear you properly. Could you move a couple steps to your left?"

"Dom, you are the single most infuriating piece of information I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. What do you want?"

"You're just pissed off at me for asking you questions. I'm sorry. We don't have to talk about it."

"What are you trying to gain by all this, Dom?"

I'm quiet now.

Nimmet moves back to where she was before, at the front of the Fish. She looks a little smaller, or something, a little bit raw. I think she really hurt herself on the Fish's defenses. She sits down and looks at me, even though she can't see me, it seems like she's staring right into my eyes. She says, "What exactly is it that you are trying to gain?"

I feel this weird pressure inside me, a kind of tightening, a weighing down of my centre. I'm so angry and sad. I yell at her, "How do I know? How do I know? Do you really expect someone like me to know? How do I know what I want? How do I know?" I'm thinking about the way I've been so lonely all this time and not admitted it ever, how I was always a little pleased whenever I came across anything human-sounding in the river, how I felt when I saw that frog-thing, and the dot, and the rodent, and even more when Nimmet arrived, how pleased I really was when I saw Nimmet, but I'm feeling so tired now. Just tired.

I say, "Do you really expect someone like me to know what I want?"

"Will you come outside?"

Yes, okay.

"Yes, okay. No, leave me alone. Never. Never ever will I come outside. I have found peace here. Fuck off."

"Okay," says Nimmet. She climbs to her feet and starts off down the hill.

I yell, "Where are you going?"

"Calling my supervisor," she says.

XVIII

A little later, I look outside, and everything's dark.

What I want to believe -- and I do succeed briefly -- is that the cameras have all broken. Instead of brown and green hills, they show me grey and brown nothing, because, oh yes, because they must obey the irrational compulsions of their mechanical souls. I understand completely.

Then I see ripples, the breathing in the blankness. The minuscule movements clue me in that it's flesh, out there, that moved across the hills silently and too quickly to see, enveloped my fish and stands there now, swaying, blocking out the sky and the grass. The man of the hills is about to be brought in by a mountain of a man.

My anger leaves me. I feel sick. A voice like avalanches says,

Dom Drane? Omni-ysp5. Come with me.

I take a hold of the thread in the carpet and pull. I feel my body accelerate, and, behind me, I can hear a wet, screeching sound as the fish is split in two. Just before I arrive, I discard the bulk of my body -- the animations, the shortcuts, the procedures and routines -- hoping Godzilla out there might, for a couple seconds, mistake the shell for me.

I am frightened. I think about the size of that thing, the speed it must be capable of . . . the seconds it paused before it spoke must have represented hours of subjective time. It must have walked across the Milieu and planted itself around me, and then just stood there, like it didn't care, like it had better things to think about. I'm afraid of that, of what that can do to me. I should be dead. Or alive? What's it trying to do?

I hit pavement, hard. It's raining, I hear shouting and music in the distance. I get to my knees. I try to remember which areas in the Milieu have weather programs.

I'm at the end of an alley, with the tiniest line of white light high above me. The pavement is caked with scramble, artfully animated as vomit, blood and bits of trash. A large, tiger-marked cat is curled up a couple feet above the ground, it twitches, notices me, and yawns. I get up and wade towards the alley mouth. For what I'm planning, I'll need a good irrigation system. The cat floats ghostly behind me.

I shake in the dirty rain.

I'm not completely raw, I've brought two procedures. One is a messenger, designed to find its way to the river of the Yellow Book from anywhere on the Milieu, specifically, to the nets I've strung across that river. The other is a deletion procedure. It's a scale model of one of those black and toothy things that chased me, all those months ago, from the Almost Cemetery to what should have been certain death.

I let them go at the same time, and feel a small excruciating pain moving along my body, and leaving nothing where it's been. The deletion procedure looks hideous, munching away at my flesh.

"Christ," says the cat, with a grin. "What are you doing? Hey, Mara, check this guy out."

Scramble begins to pool at my feet. It's all red. All my scramble is red. If I've done my programming right, the color shouldn't be the only difference. Certainly there's a lot of scramble, more than you'd expect from a deletion my size. A blonde woman appears from nowhere.

The cat waves a paw in my direction. It says, "who'd have thought the old man had so much blood in him?"

My arms and legs are gone. The blonde woman looks blurry, but nice. Something to distract me while I die.

"Damn," she says. "What are you doing?"

"'lo," I hear myself mutter, in a distant world, in a frightened slur. "'m Dom Drane, too."

XIX

This is a strange place. It's just colors.

XX

Looks familiar, coming closer. Feels friendly. Feels like . . .