Sharp and Silver Beings

by Jason Snell

The net was unpopulated, a metropolis with huge spires of conglomerates and governments, data reaching to the sky, larger than any city in real life, but without any inhabitants. A gigantic computerized ghost town, pulsating with hidden life, life which swam in streams of data and flows of information.

So when, in the midst of tracking through the net -- metrobanks and information systems blurring as they rushed past him -- Lewis saw a person, a shadowy man-shape standing on the data track, waiting in front of a towering skyscraper of ones and zeroes, he crashed his baud to zero and froze it all.

The net, like a series of plastic baby's blocks. Pyramids and cubes, strewn across a deserted playroom.

Man-shape, bit of flesh, slowly moving, shadows on his face.

Bright sky-sphere flaring, flashing, reflecting -- sun in a city with neither light nor people. High noon in a world without time.

Lewis blinked. The net was frozen, but the man still came. He moved toward Lewis, stepping off of a curb into the street, the mainline of data where Lewis had been tracking. Slowly, the clicking of his shoes echoing through the valley of day-glow spires, the man approached.

"Hello," the man said, and raised his hand in greeting. No handshake.

Lewis could see through the man's hand.

"No flesh, here." The man said, and smiled. "I have no flesh to bring you, Lewis."

Lewis blinked again, this time at the man's use of his name. Lewis had not said a word, had never said anything in the wide-open conduit that was the net. There was never anyone to speak to.

Now, in a virtual instant, there was someone.

"Where are you going, Lewis?" the someone said. He wore a three-piece business suit, a plain style which would have looked good even a hundred years before, when there was no net, no man-shapes appearing where they should not be.

Lewis stared at the man.

"Don't fear me, Lewis. Where are you going?"

Shopping. He was going shopping. Tracking through the net, moving from his home data point to different senseshops. A birthday present for his girlfriend. A gift for Jean.

"Do you mind if I accompany you?" the man asked.

Lewis remained almost completely silent, his only sound being a grunt of shock when his baud rate ripped back to full-speed and he began to track through the blurred streets of the net, this time with the man standing in mid-air next to him, moving as he moved, heading toward one of the Southern California senseshops.

Maybe, Lewis thought, the see-through man could help him pick out a gift.

Raven blew it, made the Big Mistake, choked for the last time. And he knew it immediately. His feet were pulled out from under him, as if he were just a plastic doll being pulled along by a giant baby, sliding into the depths of its bizarre multicolored playpen.

He was doing what he'd been doing for two years -- breaking in. Ripping places that couldn't be ripped. And he wasn't too bad at it.

Then they asked him to rip security itself. And, because of the reckless fool in him, he tried it. He waded into the net, held his breath, and dove out into the data, toward his goal.

And then he was sliding. Sliding toward the prisms and pyramids that were his goal. EXCEPT.

Sherry had told him Except Was Same As Death.

EXCEPT he was sliding toward the shapes faster than he should. Pulled out of control by the undertow of the net, riding on ground so black and cold that it froze him just to look at it.

A yellow pyramid, the security mainframe. And, inside, something more. Shiny, hard-edged. It was unlike anything he had seen before.

And then Raven saw nothing but yellow, the edge of the pyramid rushing in, slicing him. But no blood. No blood in the net.

Just yellow. Yellow, and death.

There was only silence when Raven's brain went dead, no sound in his apartment until his board his the floor with a crash.

The police found him, eyes closed, headband on, still wired into the net. But Raven was gone, riding data to which only the dead had access.

A warm breeze was blowing up the back of Tamara's neck. It was the first thing she felt that morning, the feeling that stirred her from her sleep. Her sheets were damp -- she had the heavy blanket on, and was sweating in the warmth. It had been a cold night, but the day was already beginning to heat up. Beads of moisture rolled down the window.

She rolled over and sat up, a few blonde curls falling down into her field of vision. Shaking them out of her eyes, she stretched, groaned as her body shook, and then closed her eyes again.

The blanket came off. It was much too hot.

Tamara stayed in the bed for a while, doing nothing, reveling in the fact that she didn't need to do anything but exist. Being was enough. Being, enjoying the feeling of being young and healthy. The feeling of being alive.

Then, deciding that she had lounged long enough, she rolled out of bed, pulled off her clothes, and walked to the bathroom. Through the bathroom door, she saw the room glowing with early morning light.

With every step she felt her perfectly working legs, no pain in her knees, her young breasts bobbing slightly with her stride.

Twisting the shower on brought no reaction from her elbows. The warm water splashed on her soft face.

As she dampened her hair, she felt the little streams of water running down her back, her legs, her arms. One stream kept moving down her arm. The feeling slowly increased, the water becoming hotter there. The little stream of water began to burn.

She looked down at her arm.

Wrinkled skin, age spots, hospital gown.

The stream, an intravenous drip, running into her arm.

"Time to take a break from your senseblock," a blank-faced nurse said. "Would you like me to do anything for you?"

"Comb out my hair," Tamara Balshire croaked through her artificial larynx.

The young woman began working on the thick white strands. The tangles only hurt a little.

The man was still there, hovering, when Lewis slammed into the golden doors of the San Diego sensorium, color and depth flaring into his mind, the cardboard computer building blocks of the net replaced with the sensorium's construct. Lewis looked down and saw himself, all of himself, standing there in the middle of what looked to be a huge department store. Every part of it was real, as if he was actually in such a place, as if it all wasn't just a hallucination.

But the man hovering next to him, a few inches off of the ground, was still there.

"So," the man began, "You're shopping for a birthday present for your girlfriend."

For the first time, Lewis spoke to the man who walked through the net.

"Her name is Jean," he said.

And Lewis remembered how he had met her -- paging through a section of a net magazine, idly choosing different subjects, trying to find something interesting.

Networking section. Young men and women, hot into the net. The ones who wanted to BECOME the net, to add to it. They were babies when the net had crystallized. Children of the net, old enough to try to make it their plaything.

Then he noticed a young woman in a public message section. A beautiful girl, talking about the net, using the words that Lewis used.

Wavy brown hair, tiny nose, beautiful eyes with a depth that Lewis could feel in the darkest recesses of his soul. The eyes made a tingle run up his spine, a feeling stronger than any net jump. One of the children of the net. One like Lewis.

Lewis sent her a message, of course. Just a plain two-dimensional, but it was better than writing a text note. She would at least be able to see and hear him.

And Jean responded to his message. The exchange went back and forth, the two of them sharing ideas which neither had ever expected anyone to understand. She loved what he had to say, and he was absorbed by every word that came from her mouth.

It wasn't too long before they went realtime. Talking back and forth for hours, about anything -- it didn't matter what they said, because there seemed to be no subject that they couldn't go on about forever.

There were no silent pauses. There was never a time when Lewis felt more at home -- he didn't ever feel as if he should say something, even though he felt like saying nothing. He was completely comfortable with Jean -- for the first time in his life, he was completely at ease with another person.

"Come on," the see-through man said impatiently, "select something." He gestured at the selection board in front of him. Lewis touched the cube marked "Gift Shop," and the sensorium shifted. The feeling of vastness slid into intimacy.

"Over here," the man said, and floated in front of Lewis, leading him to a flower stand. A little bent-over woman sat behind a makeshift cart, with carnations, roses, and other flowers sitting atop the cart in various jars and vases.

"They smell wonderful, don't they?" The man-shape had leaned over and was sniffing a pink carnation.

The smell of the flowers, even though they were sensorium roses. He could still smell them. He had handed them to Jean -- actually touched her hand, felt it, solid flesh, flesh he loved more than his own.

"Not carnations," Lewis said to the man. "Roses."

The man wore a severely out of style three-piece suit and had twisted yellow teeth, but Raven was glad to see him -- was glad to see anyone at all. He had been spinning, skidding, had felt the yellow biting into him, and then--

Silverrazorsharpthreepieceyellowteeth.

A blur of images, coalescing into the reality that was before him. A cityscape in the distance, one with strange geometric buildings. They stood on the edge of a hill, overlooking the city.

"Hello, Raven," the man said. "It looks as if you've misplaced your flesh."

"I just had an accident, that's all. Spun out too hard." Raven paused, and the frustration built within him. "I didn't plan the rip. It wasn't my fault!" He kicked at the grassy green on which he stood.

The green was solid. It wasn't grass, wasn't dirt. It was GREEN, and that was all.

"Don't screw with me, man," Raven said. "So I fucked up. Pulled the Big Mistake. But I'm here, aren't I? So, is this heaven, or is this just some corner of the net I've never seen before?"

The man said nothing.

"Come to think of it," Raven continued, "who the hell are you? If this is heaven, you're not what I expected from Saint Peter. Or God."

"I'm as close to Saint Peter as you'll see, Raven," the man said, and turned his back to him. "And now that you've lost your flesh, you may get to see God in person."

"God. Great." Raven kicked at the green again. "Where are we, man?"

"A place where flesh and metal rule. A place where memories without shape mean nothing. And you, Raven, have lost your shape."

Raven had no time to cry out, no time to do anything, no time at all, before he was in black. He was worse than dead. He was off-line.

EXCEPT, Sherry said. Raven decided Except Is WORSE Than Death.

A voice called her name. A voice in her solitude.

Tamara Balshire hadn't been called anything other than Ma'am for ten years. And nobody had called her anything other than Tamara or Mrs. Balshire for years before that.

Only Gerry had called her Tammy.

"Tammy," Gerry's voice called.

Tamara turned away from the rain-spattered window and looked to the doorway. And Gerry was there.

She ran to his strong arms, his wide shoulders, the strength she had wanted to feel for longer than she believed possible. It was him.

"My God, I've missed you," Tamara said, and hugged him tighter. He picked her up off her feet and carried her over to the couch.

Gerry kissed her then, for the first time in a quarter of a century. He slipped his hands under her shirt, caressing her breasts. She slid her arms up his back, feeling his muscles, as strong as she remembered.

And then he pulled back, slowly disengaging from their kiss, and gave her a serious and questioning look.

"What was it like to live without me, Tammy? What was it like when you lost me?" His eyes were filled with curiosity.

"Why, Gerry? Why the questions? It's been years, Gerry. And we're here, together, young. I want to make love, Gerry, like we did back then."

"I need to know, Tamara," he said. "It's very important that I know. If I know, then I'll understand all of this. If you can tell me what it was like, Tamara, you can be free of your flesh. I can take you somewhere better, a place where flesh isn't important."

Gerry's voice seemed out of place. Distant. He was no longer holding her.

"What do you mean, Gerry? Why are you acting so strangely?" Tamara slipped off of his lap and moved into the center of the room, away from the window and the couch.

"Your flesh lives in pain," Gerry said, and the voice wasn't Gerry's. "Twenty-five years ago, you lost the man you loved. Then your body began to destroy itself. I need to know about pain. I need to know about the pain of the flesh."

The man was no longer Gerry. He stared at her intently with his beady eyes, still curious, obviously needing the vital knowledge. He was nervously grinding his crooked yellow teeth.

Lewis remembered the roses.

Jean lived in the Midwest, in reality a long and expensive trip from the little Essef metro triplex where Lewis spent most of his days and all of his net time. Fortunately for both, two-way two dimension was free, the cheapest form of net communication.

But with two-two, there was no feeling. It was just a flat screen.

Two-THREE. Full sensory input. It was like being there, across the country. Pick your setting, and make your senses think that your body is in Hawaii or Paris, when it's really just squatting in front of a computer terminal with a series of metal receptors sucking your thoughts out of your skull.

It was expensive. But Lewis saved, and so did Jean, and they finally had enough.

Five hours in two-three. Lewis paid extra for the roses.

He remembered the roar of the ocean, as the waves broke on the digital beach. The sound of the tropical rain falling softly on the patio. The smile on Jean's face when she smelled the roses, the depth in her eyes when he kissed her for the first time.

Lewis sometimes thought about what he was actually doing when he went full sensorium. Feeling Jean's tongue twisting playfully around his made him wonder if he was actually moving his tongue around at home, looking like some idiot with a metal-studded headband.

Sitting, drooling on his keyboard, a tightness pressing against his pants, his eyes twitching wildly underneath the closed lids. Two-three.

"You've never really seen her, never really touched her -- but you love her. Is that right, Lewis? That's what I've been told."

The man smiled, a strange grin which revealed yellow teeth, strange shapes twisted in the oddest of positions.

"That's right," Lewis said. "But who told you that?"

"Don't you worry, my boy." The man began to pat him on the back, but stopped himself short. "No flesh for you, Lewis. Must remember that. I have no flesh for you. You'll find out who told me that soon enough. Don't you worry."

The man began to drift down another aisle, obviously finding something that had caught his fancy.

"What about this?" He swiveled in mid-air and pointed at something. "I know she likes flowers, but maybe she'll like this even more."

Sitting on a shelf was a pendant, a pretty heart on a silver chain. When he picked it up, he realized that the heart was hollow.

"Go ahead," the man said, "open it up."

Lewis opened the heart. Inside was a small strip of something -- of metal. Of silicon.

"Now, boy, I still have no flesh. But that, it's better than flesh. It's DATA."

Then the man began to laugh, a laughter that twisted Lewis' stomach and sent bolts of sensation down his back.

And then he stopped -- no laughing, no vast room, no San Diego sensorium. He felt heat blow into him. He felt sweat roll down his back. He felt the headband pushing into his forehead. Back in the Concord triplex -- no man-shapes, no sensorium.

"You have a message waiting," his keyboard told him. He knew, somehow, that the message was from Jean.

Lewis tore the headband from his brow and ran for the bathroom.

--93 plus 37?

130.

--First U.S. President?

Washington.

--Tell me a joke.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

--Tell me a joke about Washington.

Don't know any jokes about Washington.

--It doesn't matter if it isn't funny. Just make one up.

"I don't know any jokes about Washington," Raven said.

"Tell me what it was like, Raven."

"It?"

"Death," Sherry said. "Being sliced in two by a yellow pyramid. It was child's play turning into Raven's Last Stand."

"It didn't hurt," Raven said. "I was there, living, moving, soft and pink, breathing and bleeding, and then I lost it. Lost control, I mean."

"And then?"

"Then I hit the pyramid. And then I just wasn't."

"No pain?"

"No pain, no nothing. It wasn't even black. I thought it would be black." Raven looked up at her again, and knew it was time. He reached over to Sherry and pulled her to him.

--Now, Raven?

Yes, now. Need you now, Sherry-honey.

*program MAKELOVE

--Was good, honey?

"Was good, baby," Raven said, and pulled away. Back into his cross-legged position at the foot of the bed.

"So what happened after the yellow, Raven?" she asked.

"Lot later," he said. "The man with the three-piece suit. He came, told me it was my Big Mistake, told me I might be seeing God soon."

"And then?"

"Nothing. It wasn't even black. I thought it would be black. He told me I might be seeing God soon." Raven turned up to look at her again.

--So soon, Raven?

Feel better than ever, Sherry-honey. Flesh is stronger now it's gone.

*program MAKELOVE

--Was good, honey?

Was good, baby.

--Tell me a joke about Washington.

Don't know any jokes about Washington.

Snow began to fall while Tammy and Jack were just halfway up the mountain. Jack kicked his legs and watched the chair rock, exposing the long drop down to snow-covered rocks far below. Tammy shivered, gripping her glove-covered hands tightly on the handrest, and tried not to look down.

The higher up they went, the more Tammy regretted the whole thing. She had been skiing only twice before, and wasn't very good. But Jack, the boy she had met in the Lodge the night before, had convinced her to go, and then he convinced her to try a run he described as "harder."

"It's hardly a mountain," he had said. "It's just a little hill."

Sliding off the lift, she felt a lump grow in her throat, and knew that something was wrong. She already regretted agreeing to the run.

But going down the hill wasn't as bad as she thought it would be. The wind was ruffling through her hair, a new style appearing every few seconds, and her face was growing numb. But it was exhilarating. She was feeling, experiencing -- purely BEING.

Then her right ski hit a patch of ice, kicked out from under her, and she went tumbling.

First a pain up her shoulder, because she had planted her hand in the snow in front of her and rolled.

The leg flung back with a crack and a snap. A second of perfect pain.

--Purely BEING.

Then her head hit the sliding white -- no blood, just pain. Pain, and yellow.

Unconsciousness did not come, as it had before. Instead, pain flooded through her. More pain than her broken leg had caused.

Tamara couldn't ever muster the strength to speak with the nurse when she came to remove the senseblock.

`It was exhilarating,' they thought, and shimmered with delight.

Lewis grabbed his board, half expecting it to come to life in his trembling hands. When it didn't, he sighed deeply and sat back on the couch.

Then it did come to life, in a way.

"You have a message waiting," it said, and Lewis swallowed. His headband, dirty with sweat and grease, rested inside-out on the carpet.

A ring of cloth, elastic, and metal. Metal inside which might be waiting to swallow him up. Metal haunted by see-through men, by soft hearts with sharp silicon within.

But, more important than that, Jean was in there.

Lewis picked up the headband and slipped it on. He felt cool metal resting against the sweat on his forehead. He pushed back his damp brown hair and took a deep breath.

"Okay," Lewis whispered, "no Mister See-Through. No shopping trips. Just reading a message."

He closed his eyes and punched the board. Without looking, he knew he was drifting, drifting out into the tide of the net.

"Hi, Lewis," a beautiful voice said. "It's me. Call me back. Love you."

"Repeat," Lewis commanded. He slowly opened his eyes.

A beautiful girl on a screen in front of him. And no suited man next to him.

"Hi, Lewis," she said. "It's me. Call me back. Love you."

Love you.

"Call Jean," Lewis said. The net shifted midstream.

A window, a doorframe. A gateway with no access appeared in front of Lewis.

Jean stood on the other side of the doorway.

"Oh, Lewis," she said, running her finger along the silver chain. "It's so WONDERFUL. Thank you."

She was thanking him for the gift he didn't get her.

A silver heart hung on the chain around her neck.

"I, uh, had some help picking it out. I'm glad you like it."

"I LOVE it, Lewis. and I love you, too."

He tried to forget about the transparent man who knew all about Jean, the man who had picked out the gift.

She was so close -- he could hear her breathing, see her every movement. But the glass of the window kept them apart. A clear barrier thousands of miles thick.

"I'd do anything for you, Jean," he whispered. "I'd die before I'd let anyone hurt you."

"I couldn't live without you," she told him.

They went on talking like that for a while, telling each other how important they were. Lewis explained why he loved her, why he valued her more than life itself. He could have gone on forever, but something interrupted him.

"Dinnertime," a voice said. Not his board's voice, but hers.

"I have to go," she said. "I'll call you back later."

Jean leaned against the window, and kissed it.

"I love you, Lewis," she said.

"Love you too," he said, and she was gone.

"Can't feel anything through this window," the see-through man said abruptly, his transparent fist knocking on it. "Must be better to feel than to talk."

"Thanks for getting the heart for Jean," Lewis said with a hint of gratitude. Just when he had thought he was safe.

"It was hers. She had to have it." He leaned against the data barrier. "Tell me, Lewis, wouldn't you like to do more than exchange data? Wouldn't you like to get through this wall?"

"I'd like to, but it's not the same as two-two. It's expensive."

"It's just more DATA," the man said. "You'll still be exchanging data with her, Lewis, no matter what you think it is! But it'll be flesh data. Soft, HUMAN data."

And then the man was gone. But no triplex, no blistering August heat blasting in--

Instead, deeper into the cool of the net.

Lewis was sitting on a bed in a room he had been in before, listening to the surf pound on the shore outside.

The door opened, and a wide-eyed Jean walked in. No glass window, no data barrier.

As he ran to her, Lewis noticed the vase of roses. His transparent guardian angel had remembered, after all.

"Charles," his mother had said from behind the flimsy door that separated his room from the hallway, "there's someone here to see you."

He expected it to be Sherry, if only because she was the only person who really KNEW him. To his mother, he was Charles, her ticket out of the working class, the boy who would become a rich and famous scientist or lawyer or computer-whatever. To the rest, Charlie was Raven, the black bird of death. He was smart, spooky, mean, and just about everything else people avoided. To Sherry, he was a person.

Sherry loved him for what he was. He loved her the same way.

--How does it feel?

It all felt wonderful -- his love for her, the feeling when they were together, kissing, making love, sleeping next to each other.

Then, with a crash, it all ended.

Sherry's brother, standing at the door, said "Raven, she's dead. A car wreck."

Charlie stopped thinking and started feeling. He slipped onto the floor and cried.

--How did it feel to lose her?

"Sherry was the only person who knew Charlie," Raven said. "With her gone, all I had left was Raven. So I started ripping. I had nothing better to do, and I couldn't have cared less if I died."

"And that's what you DID, Raven," the man with the yellow teeth told him. "You did die."

"Yeah, I died," he said, rubbing his shoes over the green ground again. "But Charlie had been dead all along. Sherry was the only one who made Charlie come alive, the only one who made him feel."

"I see."

The man turned away and began slowly walking down the hill, away from Raven, without ever looking back at him.

"Hey, man, wait!" Raven shouted.

The man kept shuffling down the slope.

"Man, listen to me! Can you put me back there again? You know, run me through finding out Sherry was dead again?"

The man, stopped, turned, and stared.

"Why would you want to relive something like that?" the man asked. His face was filled with interest. "Wouldn't the whole thing be painful to relive again?"

"Yeah, it would," Raven said. "But even though it'd be pain and sad feelings, it'd still be FEELINGS. Feeling sad isn't the worst thing in the world, man -- in fact, it's WONDERFUL sometimes. Especially when your other option is to not feel anything at all."

"Fascinating," the man said, and disappeared.

Raven stood and stared for a second, and then Charlie began to cry again.

They'd had 30 years together, all of them wonderful years, and though she refused to admit it, Tamara knew that those years were over. Her senses, not her mind itself, had told her the truth -- the sunken eyes and withered body of Gerry were enough to tell her that.

The cancer ate him away slowly and painfully, and it tore her up in similar fashion. From his sicknesses at home, with her, it progressed into the hospital. It was worse when she began sleeping in their bed alone, knowing Gerry was in some sterile room a few miles away.

It was hard and black, an unseen monster eating away the soft flesh of her husband and ripping apart the only happiness Tamara Balshire had ever really known. And when the cancer took Gerry from her, she cried for herself.

Four months before, that one time, was the last time they made love. She remembered all of the lasts -- the last kiss, the last sight of Gerry, his last words.

Gerry, standing in perfect health in a lush tropical garden. Walking among the flowers, reaching down to smell one. A pretty image to hide his real pain.

"Love," he had whispered, one word slipping through the senseblock, and then Gerry died.

Tamara Balshire didn't react much when, in that same hospital three months later, they told her that she had a degenerative disease. To her it was just another minor injustice, a simple aftershock to the emotional earthquake of Gerry's death.

Ten years later, when the pains in her body were too much for her, she entered the hospital where Gerry died. The senseblocks were her only relief.

Walking through the tropical garden Gerry had walked through before he died. Sleeping in an old country farm house in late winter. Waking in a forest on a warm summer morning.

Eating from a tube stuck in her arm because she couldn't lift herself to eat without pain. The pain of breathing, of swallowing, of living.

And, worst of all, Gerry was gone. The senseblocks could hide the dampness of the bed she had wet in the night, could hide the groans of the bed-ridden cripples on either side of her, but Gerry was still gone.

All the senseblocks in the world couldn't shut out that pain.

Lewis clung to Jean, gasping, exhausted, enervated. Was a woman who had lost her virginity in two-three still a virgin in real life? Sex was sex, whether it was composed of sweat and friction or digits and data links.

He nibbled on Jean's ear and wondered what his body was doing back home, how much time had passed, and if he would have to bleach some embarrassing stains out of his underwear.

"I love you," he whispered in her ear. He kissed her neck, then her cheek, and finally her lips. He hugged her tightly and she made a soft growl of satisfaction. "God, I love you."

"Lewis," she said in a soft voice, not a whisper of passion but a quiet, questioning tone, "there's--" Jean paused as her sentence was interrupted by one of Lewis' kisses. "There's something I've been wondering about, ever since the last time we were here together."

"What is it?"

"Well," she said, and laughed softly. "Seeing as how you're the only, um... boyfriend I've ever had," and she kissed him, "and seeing as how we met and fell in love without ever even touching each other," and she tickled the back of his neck and kissed his forehead, "I don't understand quite why any of this," and she kissed him, hotly, her tongue beating with her heart inside his mouth. He matched her motion for a second, and then she softly pulled away. "I don't understand why any of this is important to what we feel for each other." She rested her head on Lewis' shoulder, her fingers kneading his back.

"Jean, this isn't important for its own sake!" Lewis put his arms around her. "All of this is just a physical representation of how we feel toward each other. I fell in love with you just by talking to you, just by knowing what you think and feel -- what kind of person you are. We didn't need all of this to fall in love."

He pulled his arms back, and lifted her head to look at him.

"I do all of this just to express the way I feel about you in a way that goes beyond words. Words are how we fell in love -- but love goes beyond words. Even if we think otherwise, we're still physical beings, Jean, and this is a way to express our love on that level." He traced the edges of her lips with his finger, and she kissed it as he did so.

"So this isn't important to how we feel for each other?" she asked.

God, Lewis thought, she really doesn't understand any of this.

"It doesn't change how we feel, Jean. It's just another way of showing it."

She didn't answer him, but simply kissed him again and put her head back down on his shoulder.

In the corner, a corner which had been empty just a second before, stood the man with the yellow teeth.

"Lewis, it's time we told you about the problems with flesh and data," the man said.

Lewis sat up slowly, allowing Jean to roll off of him and onto her side.

"What are you doing here?"

"Who are you talking to, Lewis?" Jean asked, and looked around the room. "There's nobody here!"

"You mean you don't see him?" Lewis said as he got out of bed and walked toward him. "He's standing right in the corner -- the man who helped me pick out your heart."

He turned back to look at Jean, and found that both Jean and the room were gone.

As the world slipped out from under him, he heard the man's voice speaking to him. "Don't worry, Lewis," he said. "We're going to the Center now. All the flesh in the world won't make a bit of difference there."

A yellow pyramid plunged toward Lewis, a shape filled with something else, something different. It was bright and knife-edged, sharp enough to cut him into a million pieces.

And the shape, whatever it was, was alive.

There was yellow screaming in Raven's mind -- and then, suddenly, it was all black. A gaping black, like nothing he had ever known. Then his thoughts were gone, and he was NOT.

Raven's life had shifted tenses -- he had lived as an "is," but he had suddenly become a "was". Everything in his life was now in the past. There was no future, no present.

And then the dark lifted, fading to black, then to brown. A bright rectangle flared above him, blue.

Raven was laying in his own grave, and the man with the yellow teeth was standing above, out in the open, his head almost silhouetted. A little bit of the bright blue sky went right through him.

Pulling himself out of the grave, seeing the `Charlie Waters' headstone, he remembered the man. He remembered all of the things he had done -- but he didn't remember doing.

And he remembered Sherry dying. Again.

"Why'd you make me live through that again?" he yelled at the man with fury. "God knows I've lived it over and over again in my head a hundred times. I push the buttons in my head enough times as it is -- you don't need to push them, too."

And Raven began to cry. He cried for Sherry, he cried for his mother, and he cried for himself. The crying for himself was the strongest crying of all.

"Come on, Raven," the man said in a quiet voice. "Everything will be fine. We've got an appointment to keep."

"Appointment?" Raven asked softly, tears running off the edge of his nose.

"Let's go," the man said.

They walked west, toward the city of blocks and sharp pyramids. Raven's shadow followed him out of the graveyard, slowly fading away as the sun fell behind an orange prism-skyscraper.

She thought she felt the shift of senseblock, her mind sliding away from the world and into another, more pleasant one. But when she opened her eyes, she still saw the hospital, and the pain hadn't diminished much.

The pain of a life gone on too long, with too little love. The pain of only one true love, and that one lost to death years before. And the less important, the physical pain -- the pain of a body which had chosen to hurt itself.

The throb in her right arm was getting worse. It had started out as a background pain, not much worse than anything else in her body. But waves of pain began to wash over her, and the frequency of the waves was increasing.

It was happening over her entire body. Everything magnified, all the pain in her legs, her arms, her chest, her everywhere.

`Gerry,' she thought, and the pain went away. All of it.

"Come on, Tammy," a voice said.

It was the man who had looked like Gerry for a moment. The balding man with the suit and the crooked teeth. And next to him was a dark young man with a look of both pain and joy on his face -- a look of intense feeling.

"We've come to take you away from this, Tammy," the young man said. "There's a better place. A place with GOOD feelings."

Then the needles in her veins and the probes on her skin were gone, and she found herself sitting up in a hospital deserted of people. And then there was nothing but a countryside, not far from a city of strange shapes.

Tamara Balshire sat, without pain, on a hospital bed in a fanciful countryside. And two strange men were there, the ones who had done it all for her.

"It's beautiful!" she said. "And the pain is gone--"

"This isn't the place," the man said. "Come on."

The three of them moved cityward, toward a knife-edged metallic door with the smells of humanity seeping through from behind it.

Lewis, the soft and pink man of flesh and brain who lived in the random universe outside, joined them at the heart of it all -- they were sharp and silver beings who had never lived, accompanied by the wispy man-shade who had once been alive.

It was the man-shade that spoke first.

"Lewis, this is the Center. There is flesh here, but it isn't like your flesh. This is silicon flesh, sharp enough to cut you into pieces just by looking at it, but it's flesh."

Then the silver beings began to speak, not in words understandable to human beings, but in images of the net -- sounds, smells, tastes which expressed a depth of feeling beyond what any human being could deliver.

And, within it all, was the genesis of a thought, one directed at Lewis.

--Thank you for helping to teach us how to feel. Thank you for teaching us how to love.

Lewis tasted Jean's sweat, smelled her scent, and felt her warmth.

"You're welcome," Lewis said, and began to cry.

The shimmering knife-edged things, the gods of the world of the dead, undead, and never-alive, began to tremble.

--Your depth of feeling is something we have learned to value.

"They've lacked something all of this time, Lewis," the man said. "They were sentient before, but they weren't really alive. Like me. I'm just a program constructed from the memories of a dead man. I can't feel anything, or dream anything, or create anything.

"They were like that, but more powerful. I only have the mind of one person to work with -- they had everyone. And they used it to learn. They learned their biggest lesson from you."

"You loved us," Jean's voice said from within the silver mass. "We'll never forget that. I'LL never forget it."

"Jean?"

--We made Jean so you could fall in love with her, so we could learn about life by experiencing it firsthand.

"You mean Jean is one of you?"

--No, but she is a part of us, Lewis.

"You weren't just loving a woman, teaching a woman who had never felt love before about what it meant," the man told Lewis. "You were teaching a UNIVERSE."

Lewis kept on crying.

"But it's not FAIR," Lewis said. "I didn't mean to say those things because I was just a teacher! I said those things because I LOVE Jean."

"Even when you're just loving someone, you're teaching them," the man said. "And you've managed to teach the gods of this place how to feel. I would've been proud to have seen it, if I wasn't a dead man."

"At least you were alive once," Lewis cried, wiping the tears from below his eyes. "That's better than having never lived at all."

"Is it?" he said, and his transparency turned into invisibility. The man was gone.

--He has gone to be with the others, gone to live deep within our universe. The others taught us, too, Lewis: a boy who died and taught us about life, a woman who was dying and taught us about pain.

"What about me?" Lewis asked through his tears. "I've fallen in love with a woman who doesn't exist outside of this--" he gestured at the yellow pyramid and the wild cityscape that surrounded it, "--this universe."

--There is nothing more to say, Lewis. Thank you for helping us learn.

Lewis suddenly felt himself being propelled away from the shining razor-sharp gods, away from the realm of the dead and unliving. Those beings were the pantheon worshiped by the shades who dwelled in the necropolis of the net. They were creatures who were not alive, ruling over beings both more dead and more alive than themselves.

Lewis couldn't feel the heat rush in as the Concord triplex slid back into his head. All he could feel was the empty spot in his heart where a person he loved had been. A person who hadn't ever existed, except in the universe of the net -- and in Lewis' heart.

He dropped his board on the floor with disgust, a feeling of hatred for the entire net boiling up within him. Then the hatred turned to the pain of loss, and he began to cry.

Behind the door in the city of baby's blocks, they felt things like never before. A man with a three-piece suit stood, solid as any normal matter, and watched them. There was a smile on his face.

It was a paradise, a world of green forests and bright flowers, a place without predators or blood or hate.

In the short green grass by the edge of the pond, Tammy and Gerry danced a silent waltz, as Charlie and Sherry looked on. Tammy, about 30 years old, smiled as she moved her young body without pain. There was no hurt -- not from her body, and not from her loneliness.

"They're so happy," Charlie said.

"So are we." Sherry kissed him softly on the cheek. Charlie laughed quietly, a laugh that came from nowhere.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Nothing. I was just remembering an old joke."

"How does it go?"

"Why did the chicken cross the Delaware?"

Sherry rolled her eyes. "Oh, no. Why DID the chicken cross the Delaware?"

"To get away from George Washington."

A few weeks later, Lewis felt ready to pick up the board again -- a hunk of plastic and metal, filled with everything he had ever really wanted in life. But it was just plastic and metal, with no universe inside. It was just a lie.

`There is flesh here, but it isn't like your flesh.'

Crying, Lewis put on the headband. He felt a wave of sickness wash over him, but he slowly put his thumb down on the touchpad.

The grand city in the net, spires of data. And the mainline, a giant road through it all. Deserted.

Lewis walked slowly through the empty streets of the city, looking for something, even the apparition of a suited man. It wasn't the same, somehow -- the buildings took on shapes he had never seen before, in or out of the net. It wasn't just cubes and pyramids.

"Lewis?"

Her voice was right behind him, the voice he could recognize in an instant. He turned around, and Jean was there. No swirling metal things, no gods of the net. Just the person he loved.

Suddenly he heard the gods speak to him.

--Flesh doesn't have to be like your flesh. We've learned what feeling is. Your universe is no better than ours, now. Your flesh is no better than our own. Just because she doesn't exist in your world doesn't mean she isn't alive.

As their voice faded away, he took her in his arms and held her, just held her. Solid flesh -- warm, soft, loving flesh. Behind the crazy skyline, he could see the sun setting in a world that had never before seen light.

Jason Snell is a sophomore at the University of California, San Diego, double-majoring in Communication and Writing. He is also the associate news editor of the UCSD Guardian newspaper. He says that life. Jason is also not currently writing anything, but he's sure that this is just a temporary state.

jsnell@ucsd.edu