the confidence of a healthy, ambulatory male. Probably white and good-looking. The charm and optimism of a guy who does not yet know what people will do to other people, to other living things, once terrors and hurts and needs set in.
“Just a hint?”
“Well, it’s simple, really. More of everything. More surprises. More possibilities. More places, filled with more kinds of creatures. Imagine Mastery, after it doubles in richness and complexity forty times. We don’t even know what such a place might look like.” All from a seed this big.
“Oh. That’s so amazing. So . . . beautiful!”
Something stabs at Neelay. He wants to say: Ask me again. There’s more.
“Can I ask about you?”
Neelay’s pulse spikes, like he’s trying to lift himself on his set of exercise rings. Please, no. Please don’t. “Of course.”
“I’ve read quite a few stories about you. Your own employees call you a hermit.”
“I’m not a hermit. It’s just—my legs don’t work.”
“I read about that. How do you run the company?”
“Phone. Email. Online messaging.”
“Why are there no pictures of you?”
“It isn’t pretty.”
The answer flusters Chris. Neelay wants to say: It’s all right. It’s only RL.
“Do you feel that growing up as the child of immigrants—”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Probably, no.”
“No, what?”
“I don’t think it had much of an influence on me.”
“But . . . how about being Indian-American? Don’t you feel that—”
“Here’s what I think. I’ve been Gandhi and Hitler and Chief Joseph. I’ve wielded plus-six great swords while wearing little chain mail thong bikinis that, frankly, didn’t give me all that much protection!”
Chris laughs. It’s a beautiful, confident laugh. Neelay doesn’t care what the man looks like. He doesn’t care if he’s four hundred pounds and covered in cold sores. Desire rushes him. Would you like to go out together sometime? But going out would have to be going in. Nothing needs to happen. Nothing could happen, in fact. That’s all gone. We could just . . . sit together somewhere, talk about all things, no fear, no hurt, no consequences. Just sit and talk about where people are going.
Impossible. One look at Neelay’s grotesque limbs and even this confident, laughing journalist would be disgusted. Yet this man Chris—he loves Neelay’s game. He plays it all night, and into morning. The code Neelay wrote is changing this other man’s brain.
“It’s just this. I’ve been lots of things. I’ve lived all over. In Stone Age Africa and on the outer rim of other galaxies. I think that soon enough—not right away, but soon—if software keeps getting better and giving us more room, I think that we’ll be able to make ourselves into anything we want.”
“That . . . sounds a little out there.”
“Yes. Maybe it is.”
“Games aren’t . . . People will still want money. They’ll still want prestige and social status. Politics. That’s forever.”
“Yes. Forever? Maybe.” Neelay stares into his screen, a world coming on hard, where social status will accrue entirely by votes in a space that is at once instant, global, anonymous, virtual, and merciless.
“People still have bodies. They want real power. Friends and lovers. Rewards. Accomplishments.”
“Sure. But soon we’ll carry all of that around in our pockets. We’ll live and trade and make deals and have love affairs, all in symbol space. The world will be a game, with on-screen scores. And all this?” He waves, as people do on phones, even knowing Chris can’t see him. “All the things you say people really want? Real life? Soon we won’t even remember how it used to go.”
A CAR HEADS NORTH on Highway 36. Impala, going too fast by ten as it crests the rise. Down the long incline, a dozen black crates in the road block the way forward. Coffins. The driver brakes and brings the car to a stop a few feet in front of the mass funeral. In the air above the coffins, on a traverse line cabled between two trees as stout as lighthouses, a mountain lioness climbs. A harness hugs her tawny waist, clipped by carabiner to a safety cable. Her tail swishes between sleek hind haunches, and her noble, whiskered head lolls on her neck as she inspects a snagged banner.
A second car comes from the south. Rabbit, skidding to a stop in front of the coffins. It honks twice, before the driver notices the cougar. The sight is odd enough, even here in ganja-land, that the driver is happy for a minute just to gawk. The animal is young, lithe, and clothed only in a