Unnatural

  * * * *

  Uriah buried his face in his hand. Sabrina couldn’t have looked him in the eyes anyway.

  “He’s my son, too, in a sense,” he said. “I couldn’t kill him. But …”

  Out of some strange inquisitiveness, he pricked a finger on one of the thorny vines. “There’s no way out of doing that, y’know. I bet my life that Michael couldn’t survive with that whacked-out metabolism of his, without Marshall’s nanos.”

  I’ll hold you to that. “There has to be a better way.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but there just isn’t. And even if there is, Zolnerowich will never find it out. She’s a politician.”

  “A smart politician. Maybe she knows what she’s doing. She seems like the kind of person who can make difficult decisions with ethical responsibility.”

  He kept giving himself pain, to which she didn’t object, but she refused to imitate him. “Right. I’m sure that’s why she tried to get us together so we could raise a child in some sham relationship.”

  Sabrina looked at him. He probably doesn’t want to let go of Pat. “You’ve got the sham part right, but can you really blame her? Like it or not, she’s an authority figure, and if humanity loses its chance to keep going after all these years, guess who gets the ‘off with her head’? Especially when the people trust their government to prevent these kinds of abuses of technology.”

  Uriah only shook his head and shrugged in incredulity. She added in a smaller voice, “Dennis, I have something else to tell you that you might not like, but I have to get it out.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Suppose you find a way to become an Organic again. If the choice has to come down to one of the options we already have, I’d go with the governess’s plan.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me. It’s not like there’s any other way to get rid of Marshall’s copies, right?” That’s not what I was getting at. “Jesus!” He’d stabbed himself particularly hard. The growing splotch of blood on his arm would have been, outside the Mindscape, the same color as this monochromatic world.

  “Is that necessary?”

  “It’s more necessary than anything I do here. Marshall’s watching our every move, and I want him to know I won’t follow the pied piper. He’s trying to drug me up right now, I can feel it, but I can fight it with pain.” Another loud curse accompanied his self-mutilation. “Why aren’t you high as a kite right now, anyway?”

  “I was for a while, actually. Trying to hide it from Marshall, just to not give him the satisfaction. But I’m used to it by now. It’s kinda disappointing once it loses its novelty, just like real world pl–”

  She found herself mute as she lay on the grass face-up. First was a sensation of her body becoming, in a way, immaterial – not far from Uriah’s description of a Libertas’s elimination of numerous small discomforts one hadn’t even been aware of. Then every sense entered nirvana.

  Light danced in aesthetic perfection. The perfume of deities permeated virtual air. A song of every cherished melody from her past played in the best possible order. Each substance pleasing to the skin embraced her. And she could taste ambrosia.

  “I – I love Marshall,” she whispered.

  Slivers of the matrix outside her current one surfaced. Uriah’s panicked face was superimposed on the panorama. A sanguine odor and a slapping sensation came with the muffled sound of his voice. It was all tantamount to the buzz of a fly at a rock concert.

  She longed for Marshall’s presence, and he brought it to her. Slowly, peacefully came the illusion.

  Then the fly alighted on the microphone.