Iris

'I don't know. I have to think about this thing. Maybe there's a way, maybe not. . . .'

'Well? How much time do we have?'

'I don't know.' He opened his eyes. 'Shit. It has to work. We'll get back something. I just don't think it'll be Brendan Sealock.' He stood up. 'Let's get out of here. You go get the others.'

Temujin Krzakwa sat before a master control/writeboard panel, induction leads stuck to his head, trying to make things work. Despite his original opinions on the matter, it was an art of creation which quickly took possession of his entire being. There was a certain poetic and personal satisfaction to be had in breaking up extant, finished programs and reworking their subroutines into a new whole, a thing different from what had gone before. He worked feverishly, brilliantly, far beyond what he had imagined were his abilities. He found a new belief in the stories of superhuman accomplishments done under emergency conditions: indeed, more than once he had the feeling that his subconscious mind was leading the way, a feeling that the program was writing itself.

Bright Illimit was the way, as Demogorgon had intimated. It was more complex than he could have imagined, undoubtedly one of the most recursive and gestalt-oriented programs ever conceived, much less written: a fully interactive program that did strange things. As he got into it, Temujin was surprised to discover that the program was set up to raid parts of the user's personality for its terminal background data. Of course, he mused, how could it work any other way? Only the user knew what would make him the happiest. Demo knew that fact and Brendan knew how to make the program realize and utilize it. Perhaps all these things had come about in a subconscious fashion, but then perhaps not. . . . He added bits from a hundred complex utilities that had been found in Brendan's data files, added things that he knew about from his own work at Lewislab, threw in bits and pieces of everything, in hopes that something would help. It began to coalesce, and he began to feel more hopeful. Cover every contingency, he thought, then throw in the kitchen sink in case we get dirty and need to wash up. Shit. And be careful not to break any dishes. The glass can cut you painlessly under water. Bleed to death and never know it. ...

Add hard wiring. Hookups to the ship's RAW complex and remote processors, then finally into the Machine and the QTD system. Get everyone into the act. Call on the dead man. Punch in through the amygdala, rewire those taps so they access whatever's left coursing across the corpus callosum. Crank up the limbic system, deep inside the brain stem. Get that old lizard-man punching away. Tell him there're faces yet to smash, haunches yet to hump. . . .

Krzakwa felt like a mad scientist, not creating his own monster, that was old hat, but taking all the monsters that ever lived, ripping them down, stripping their wires, making new monsters from bits of the old.

Mechanics of the soul, he thought. Adjust my petty neuroses with one deft twist of a spanner. Skulls greasily opened, shining with hydraulic fluid in the operating theater. Are we all robots under the flesh?

And the flesh is just machinery writ small.

He finished and came back up, resurfaced for a breath of conditioned, artificial air. The lights of the shipworld were dimming now, the collective, insensate soul of the 'net cannibalized to a different function. Without software, the machinery is inert, and now the minds would have to be in the wires once again. He wondered palely how much danger there would be. Theoretically little—Brendan had practically fed himself to Centrum, and, with the Bright Illimit's GAM-and-Redux as the only point of contact between them and it, how could they be caught? They could always break contact, and Tem had included the small subroutine to do that in any number of places in the program. A simple error/break. He was confident it would be enough, but if he was wrong . . . Centrum would get a particularly rich haul.

In the end, when it had been explained and demonstrated, they all came to be part of the great show, to be actors and prime movers on the multipolar stage that had been so long in erecting itself. In some fashion, those who had been united in the Falling Ring knew that they had to be here. At first John held out, reluctant to give himself over to a power so closely associated with Brendan, but, inspired by the apparent heroism of the others, he too had decided to go along. They sat mute, staring and perhaps fearful, all plugged into the wires that had dominated their lives in different ways. Krzakwa looked them over. 'Well, we're ready.' He remembered

Brendan saying, 'As ready as we'll ever be,' and felt weary. 'I can't really explain what I did, and I don't think many of you would understand it, but . . . OK. We used the major operating routines from the Illimitor World to fill up Brendan's Machine. With its help, we ought to be able to find our way around in Centrum. It'll give some meaningful structure to what we find. Maybe we'll find what's left of him in there and drag what we can back. Are you set?'

John said, 'What should we expect?'

The Selenite shrugged, keeping his face blank. 'Demogorgon? No? Well, frankly, John, we can't say exactly. Our senses should report something very like the landscape of Bright Illimit. Really, it should be safe—ninety-seven percent of the circuitry is designed just to safeguard our personalities. What that actually entails, I don't know ... I mean, what it will feel like.' He looked around at them and saw that there was no point in further delay, and turned to Demogorgon. 'This is the one,' he said, tapping a lead that was attached to his head in a position near the left angular gyrus . 'You'll know what to do when the time comes.'

'I understand.'

'Do you? I'm not sure I believe that. It's your choice, though. I told you what might happen.' The other nodded. 'Like you said, it's my choice. Let's do it,' he muttered, mimicking the words of a man more than a lifetime dead.

'Everybody get comfortable, in case this takes a long time. We don't want any kinks here.' He smiled to himself. There would be no pressure gangrene in the almost zero gravity of Ocypete. Still, they arrayed themselves about the floor, assuming their habitual sleeping postures, each knowing that this would be a personal nexus for them, a moment, once the program was activated, from which they could never return. And their minds quickened,