But I have some things to take care of first, so I won't be there
for a while.'
She opened the door and left. Charley gestured toward the
egg. Gonzales stepped out of his shirt and pants and undershorts
and hung them on a hook in the locker, then stepped up and into
the egg and lay back. The umbilicals snaked quickly toward him.
He put on his facial mask and checked its seal, feeling an
unaccustomed anxietyhe had never gone into neural interface
without first tailoring his brain chemistry through drugs and
fasting.
The top half closed, and liquid began to fill the egg.
Minutes later, when the scenario should have begun, he seemed to
have disappeared into limbo. He tried to move a finger but didn't
seem to have one. He listened for the blood singing in his ears;
he had no ears, no blood. Nowhere was up, or down, or left or
right. Proprioception, the vestibular sense, vision: all the
senses by which the body knows itself had gone. Nothing was
except his frightened self: nowhere with no body.
After some time (short? long? impossible to say) he
discovered, beyond fright and anxiety, a zone of extraordinary,
cryptic interest. Something grew there, where his attention was
focused, no more than a thickening of nothingness, then there was
a spark, and everything changed: though he still had no direct
physical perception of his self, Gonzales knew: there was
something.
Now in darkness, he waited again.
A spark; another; another; a rhythmic pulse of sparks and
their rhythm of presence-and-absence created time. Gonzales was
gripped by urgency, impatience, the will for things to continue.
Sparks gathered. They flared into existence on top of one
another, and stayed; and so created space.
All urgency and anxiety had gone; Gonzales was now
fascinated. Sparks came by the score, the hundreds, thousands,
millions, billions, trillions, by the googol and the googolplex
and the googolplexgoogolplex all onto or into the one point
where space and time were defined.
And (of course, Gonzales thought) the point exploded, a
primal blossom of flame expanding to fill his vision. Would he
watch as the universe evolved, nebulae growing out of gases, stars
out of nebulae, galaxies out of stars?
No. As suddenly as eyelids open, there appeared a lake of
deep blue water bordered by stands of evergreens, with a range of
high peaks blued by haze in the distance. He turned and saw that
he stood on a platform of weathered gray wood that floated on
rusty barrels, jutting into the lake.
A man stood on the shore, waving. Next to him stood the
Aleph-figure, its gold torso and brightly-colored head brilliant
even in the bright sunlight. Gonzales walked toward them.
As he approached the two, he saw that the man next to Aleph
looked much too young to be Jerry Chapman. 'Hello,' Gonzales
said. He thought, well, maybe Aleph let him be as young as he
wants. And he looked again and realized he could not tell whether
this was a man or a woman; nothing in the person's features of
bearing gave a clue.
The Aleph-figure said, 'Hello.' Gonzales smiled, overwhelmed
for a moment by the combination of oddity and banality in the
circumstances, then said, 'Hi,' his voice catching just a little.
The other person seemed shy; he (she?) smiled and put out a
hand and said, 'Hello.' Gonzales took the hand and looked
questioningly into the young person's face. 'My name is HeyMex,'
the person without gender said.
And as Gonzales recognized the voice, he thought, what do you
mean, your 'name'? And he also thought he understood the absence
of gender markers.
'Yes, this is the memex,' the Aleph-figure said. 'Whom you
must get used to as something different from 'your' memex.'
Gonzales looked from one to another, wondering what this all meant
and what they wanted.
'But you are my memex, aren't you?' Gonzales asked.
'Yes,' HeyMex said.
The Aleph-figure said, 'However, the point is, as you see, it
is more than 'your memex.' It is beginning to discover what it is
and who it can be. Can you allow this?'
Gonzales nodded. 'Sure. But I don't know what you expect of
me.'
'Only that you do not actively interfere. It and I will do
the rest.'
'I have no objections,' Gonzales said.
The Aleph-figure said, 'Good.' And it stretched out its hand
made of light and took Gonzales's, then stepped toward him and
embraced him so that Gonzales's world filled with light for just
that moment, and the Aleph-figure said, 'Welcome.'
'What now?' Gonzales asked.
HeyMex said, 'We need to talk. There are things I haven't
told you.'
'If you want to tell me what you're up to, fine, but you
don't have to,' Gonzales said. 'I trust you, you know.' He
thought how odd that was, and how true. He and the memex had
worked together for more than a decade, the memex serving as
confidante, advisor, doctor, lawyer, factotum, personal secretary,
amanuensis, seeing him in all his moods, taking the measure of his
strengths and weaknesses, sharing his suffering and joy. And he
thought how honest, loyal, thoughtful, patient, kind and
selfless the memex had beeninhumanly so, by definition, the
machine as ultimate Boy Scout; but one, as it turned out, with
complexities and needs of its own. Gonzales waited with
anticipation for whatever it wanted to say.
HeyMex said, 'For a while now, I've been capable of appearing
in machine-space as a human being. But until we came here, I'd
