Robert Charrette - Find your own truth

Was the destruction of his dreams any less? Dodger studied Morgan. She had two arms again now. Would that mortal flesh could heal so easily after battle. She was as beautiful as she had ever been. But he could no longer see her as before. By watching her battle, he had learned about himself and what he was. "I can't be what you are, Morgan. I'm a flesh-and-blood person, not a Matrix construct. My mind depends on the organic part of me to exist here. If the meat dies, the mind dies. There would be no more Dodger."

"Databanks offer no confirmation of your hypothesis."

"No, I expect not. But they don't offer a contradiction either, do they?"

Morgan "remained silent for a millisecond. Withholding data was the closest she could come to a lie. She held out her arms, and her features blurred then sharpened into a new resolution, becoming Teresa's. "For myself, the imagery is mutable. The perceptual icon can be whatever you require."

Whatever Morgan's motivation, she had selected the worst possible incentive. The Matrix was not Teresa's place, had never been Teresa's place. Teresa was a flesh being as Dodger was.

Poor Morgan. Data-processing capacity was no intelligence; there was more to it than that. He believed that she truly was intelligent, but intelligence did not confer nor did it require the ability to feel emotions.

Intelligence certainly didn't offer a commanding knowledge of feelings.

But beyond a demonstration that Morgan did not understand him, her choice of a new face implied something that Dodger had not been aware she knew. Suddenly, being naked in the Matrix took on a new meaning to him. "YouVe been accessing my memory," he said, shocked. He had not conceived it possible.

There was no shame or guilt in her manner. "The interface allows bidirectional passage of electrical impulses. 'The two shall be as one.' Does this not mean total exchange of data?"

"Would that it did," Dodger said sadly, realizing then that his attention was divided. His longing for such an exchange actually belonged to the real world. Here a complete exchange might be possible for beings such as she. For him, though, the Matrix was ultimately no more than a fantasy. "But we can never be as one. For you are the Ghost in the Machine, born of the very stuff of cyberspace; while I am but a projection, a phantom in your realm. Because of my nature I cannot be truly of this place; and by your nature you can never know the fullness of my existence. Were I able to transcend the flesh, as I had once dreamed, matters between us might be different. Just as they would be different if you were to find a way to be more than a sequenced order of electronic impulses. But it is not so." He turned his face from Morgan. He doubted it would prevent her from observing him in total detail, but the fiction made it easier for him. "Besides, I have seen the face of love and know that it requires a whole existence, not a partial one."

She was silent, but he continued to feel her presence. He had hoped that she would abandon him and take the decision away from him. But it wasn't going to be that easy. She waited until he turned to face her again before saying, "For myself, sadness exists."

"You'll get over it in time." "Your time," she said sadly, "or mine?" He didn't know what to say. Even with his experiences in her electronic world, he couldn't appreciate the multiplicities of existence and variable experiential times of her universe. Instead of answering her question, he said, "I've got to go." "Yes."

Was that the end then? Simple agreement? Maybe he had deluded himself. Morgan was an artificial intelligence, after all. How could she be expected to react like a flesh person? "I suppose it would be foolish to ask you to try to remember me kindly. I am only meat, after all."

"For myself, there will always be memories." She raised her hand as though to touch his face, but didn't complete the gesture. He drew away from the raised hand with a backward step. He took a second and a third, trying to fix her image in his mind as he moved. Then he turned and ran up the glittering data pathway leading to a tenuous connection of his program injectors, which were the bridge between the Matrix and his body.

Irrationally, he looked back. He should not have been able to, but he could see her standing in what appeared to be a doorway hanging in the darkness of the Matrix. She was backlit by a neon glow of whirling data bits. Behind her, just before the door closed, he glimpsed the ghostly shape of an ebon boy swathed in a glittering cloak. Teresa was waiting for him.

The cabin on the mountainside had once been Hart's alone, her retreat from the world. Higher up the slope, the feathered serpent Tessien had laired, but the dragon was gone now. Like so much else.

The countryside around the cabin was mostly deserted. The tribe of elves and elf-friends whose village was situated at the base of the mountain rarely ventured this far up the slope. It was lonely country, but Sam would never be alone again. The dancers, those who had sacrificed themselves, would always accompany him. He could feel them all. Well, almost all-Howling Coyote was only a memory; Sam didn't know why. He had seen the old man's body as the elder shamans carried him away from the sprouting tree, and had felt the gift of power that had let him overcome Spider. It seemed that Howling Coyote had beea a sacrificial participant in the Dance like the others, but Sam had no sense that the Coyote shaman had stayed with him like the others. Maybe that was as it should be, a final trick of the Trickster.

She turned his gaze to the north, where the Seattle metroplex lay, infested with its corporations, crime, struggles, good citizens, and its shadows. The glow of the plex was losing its dominance of the night to the graying of the eastern sky. In the urban sprawl the sprawl's lights still cast shadows, and somewhere in those twilight realms Ghost, Sally, and Kham still roamed. They were welcome to it. He was done with that world now. For him to run the shadows would be suicide. His edge had been the magic and he was free of that now, burned clean by the searing power of the Great Ghost Dance.

Once he had denied the magic and thought that being free of it was his greatest desire. He had believed its absence from his life would bring him happiness. Now he knew that the presence or absence of the magic wasn't important. What was important was how he dealt with what life handed him. Now that he was without magic, he wasn't joyful or sad. He just accepted it as the way he was.

While fighting Spider at the last, he had stood in the realm of the totems. Bome by the Dance, he had seen more than he could tell now that he was back in his body. And when he had been there, he had understood more than he had seen. Then, he had seen as a shaman sees. Then, he had known the shapes of all things in the spirit and the shape of all shapes. He had learned the greatest secret of power: that all must live together like one being and in that harmony find the beauty residing in all things.

The sublime understanding of that truth was slipping from him now that he was mundane flesh, but its core burned in his heart. From here on all he could do was live as best he could, trying, always trying, to find that beauty.

"Walk in beauty," a brave man had once said to him.

It had been intended as a benediction, but now Sam knew it as a command as well. Life bought with death owned a duty to those who had sacrificed. He intended to pay that price.

Inu barked to call him back, and he started down the slope. Seeing a light in the cabin window, he smiled. She was awake. There hadn't been much chance to talk since Willie had brought her home. She'd been undergoing treatment and was unconscious much of the time. If she had awakened by herself, it meant she had turned the corner.