Brian Stableford - Inherit the Earth

“I don’t owe you anything,” Damon said, equally quietly. “Whoever you are, or pretend to be, I don’t owe you anything. I’m my own man.”

“You owe it to yourself to be and do everything you can,” said the person wearing Conrad Helier’s face. “Some day you will. All I’m asking you to do is to start now instead of leaving it until the day after tomorrow.”

With that, Conrad Helier’s simulacrum turned and walked away into the imaginary wilderness—into an unreasonably vivid forest like none that had ever been seen on the face of the Earth. Brightly-coloured insects fluttered into the virtual space he had vacated, impossibly pretty and precious. A semi-human dryad stepped out of the bole of one of the trees, blinking in the sudden sunlight. She wore Diana Caisson’s face, but there was nothing of the real Diana in her make-up; she was only a phantom, like the insects and the trees.

Like the invader before her, the dryad soon disappeared into a riot of colour and confusion—but Damon knew before then that whatever he chose to do today and tomorrow, he would never be rid of the challenge that had been set before him. As his father had said, the only thing to be decided was when he would begin.