the specimens with which I’d lately come into contact were the kind that help one to build up a fair immunity to feminine charms, but I’m only human.
At least, I was then.
“But what happens to me?” I asked, stubbornly. “This flesh and blood thing with a sore back and a growing anxiety about the dangers of going to sleep?”
“It is possible,” she said, “that the ultimate fate of your fleshy self might depend on the success of your copy in making contact with the masters of the macroworld. But in any case, the plans you have made may proceed as you wish.”
I had already guessed that she was going to say something like that. Think of it not as losing a body, but gaining a soul.
I felt a pressing need to stall her, and perhaps to be on my own for a few minutes, to give the matter further thought, although I could see no alternative but to bow to the pressure of inevitability. I could have told her to switch herself off, but for some reason I didn’t want to have to stare at the blank wall where she’d recently been.
“Are you sure you can make me tough enough to get by?” I asked her. “To judge by what I’ve just seen, software is very easy to kill.”
“The weapon that you saw Myrlin use is one which can only be fired from real space,” she said. “The entities that inhabit software space are by no means toothless, but they will not be able to project disruptive programming into you quite as easily as that.”
Which didn’t mean, I noted, that they couldn’t shoot destructive programming into my software self—only that they’d find it difficult.
“Is there a constructive version of the weapon?” I asked her—on the spur of the moment, because the thought had only just occurred to me. “Can you transmit programs through the air with a magic bazooka, instead of having to use wires the way our mysterious friends did when they injected Medusa into my brain?”
“In theory, yes,” she said. “But it is difficult in the extreme. The receiving matrix, whether organic or inorganic, would have to be very hospitable to the incoming program—otherwise the effect would be purely disruptive. An alien program really needs a physical bridge of some kind, like the artificial synapses which were in place during your contact, if it is to be efficiently intruded.”
It was interesting as a hypothetical question, but it didn’t really connect up with the immediate problem, which was to reconcile my reluctant mind to the prospect of a peculiar duplication.
“I need some fresh air,” I told her. It was a stupid thing to say, because the air outside my igloo was not in any way fresher than the air within—I just felt that I needed to get outside.
It turned out to be a stupid thing to do, too, because no sooner had I opened the door than John Finn stuck the business end of a needler into my windpipe and told me that if I didn’t do exactly as he said, various vital parts of my fleshy self would be scattered hither and yon amidst all the unpleasant debris which already littered the area.
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