Peer could empathize, to a degree. What was the point of being scanned, only to remain enslaved by an obsolete respect for the body's fragility? Having triumphed over mortality, how could he have gone on living as if nothing had changed? Every biological instinct, every commonsense idea about the nature of survival had been rendered absurd -- and he hadn't been able to resist the urge to dramatize the transformation.

That didn't prove that he'd wanted to die.

But whether his death had been pure misfortune, unequivocal suicide, or the result of some insanely dangerous stunt not (consciously) intended to be fatal, the four-years-out-of-date David Hawthorne had awakened in the virtual slums to realize that, personally, he'd given the prospect about as much serious consideration as that of awakening in Purgatory. Whatever he'd come to believe in those missing years, whatever he'd imagined in his last few seconds of life on that limestone overhang, up until his final scan he'd always pictured his virtual resurrection as taking place in the distant future, when either he'd be seriously wealthy, or the cost of computing would have fallen so far that money would scarcely matter.

He'd been forty-six years old, in perfect health; a senior executive with Incite PLC -- Europe's twenty-fifth largest marketing firm -- second-in-charge of the interactive targeted mail division. With care, he could have died at the age of a hundred and fifty, to become an instant member of the elite -- perhaps, by then, in a cybernetic body barely distinguishable from the real thing.

But having paid for the right not to fear death, at some level he must have confused the kind of abstract, literary, morally-charged, beloved-of-fate immortality possessed by mythical heroes and virtuous believers in the afterlife, with the highly specific free-market version he'd actually signed up for.

And whatever the convoluted psychological explanation for his death, in financial terms the result was very simple. He'd died too soon.

In a real-time week -- a few subjective hours -- he had gone from a model of flesh and blood in the lavish virtual apartment he'd bought at the time of his first scan, to a disembodied consciousness observing his Bunker. Even that hadn't been enough to let him cling to his role in the outside world. Full life insurance was not available to people who'd been scanned -- let alone those who also indulged in dangerous recreations -- and the coroner's verdict had even ruled out payment from the only over-priced watered-down substitute policy he'd been able to obtain. At a slowdown of thirty, the lowest Bunker-to-real-time factor the income from his investments could provide, communication was difficult, and productive work was impossible. Even if he'd started burning up his capital to buy the exclusive use of a processor cluster, the time-rate difference would still have rendered him unemployable. Copies whose trust funds controlled massive shareholdings, deceased company directors who sat on the unofficial boards which met twice a year and made three or four leisurely decisions, could live with the time-dilated economics of slowdown. Hawthorne had died before achieving the necessary financial critical mass -- let alone the kind of director-emeritus status where he could be paid for nothing but his name on the company letterhead.

As the reality of his situation sank in, he'd spiraled into the blackest depression. Any number of expensive, disabling diseases might have dragged him from upper-middle-class comfort into comparative poverty and isolation -- but dying "poor" had an extra sting. In corporeal life, he'd happily gone along with the consensus: money as the deepest level of reality, ownership records as the definition of truth . . . while escaping most weekends to the manicured garden of the English countryside, camping beneath the clouds, clearing his head of the City's byzantine fictions -- reminding himself how artificial, how arbitrary, it all was. He'd never quite deluded himself that he could have lived off the land: "vanishing" into a forest mapped twice a day by EarthSat on a centimeter scale; surviving on the flesh of protected species, tearing the radio-tracking collars off foxes and badgers with his bare teeth; stoically enduring any rare diseases and parasitic infestations to which his childhood vaccinations and polyclonal T-cell boosts hadn't granted him immunity. The truth was, he almost certainly would have starved, or gone insane -- but that wasn't the point. What mattered was the fact that his genes were scarcely different from those of his hunter-gatherer ancestors of ten thousand years before; that air was still breathable, and free; that sunshine still flooded the planet, still drove the food chain, still maintained a climate in which he could survive. It wasn't physically impossible, it wasn't biologically absurd, to imagine life without money.

Watching the screens of his Bunker, he'd looked back on that trite but comforting understanding with a dizzying sense of loss -- because it was no longer in his power to distance himself, however briefly, from the mass hallucination of commerce-as-reality, no longer possible to wrench some half-self-mocking sense of dignity and independence out of his hypothetical ability to live naked in the woods. Money had ceased to be a convenient fiction to be viewed with appropriate irony -- because the computerized financial transactions which flowed from his investments to the network's QIPS providers now underpinned everything he thought, everything he perceived, everything he was.

Friendless, bodiless, the entire world he'd once inhabited transformed into nothing but a blur of scenery glimpsed through the window of a high-speed train, David Hawthorne had prepared to bale out.

It was Kate who had interrupted him. She'd been delegated to make a "welcoming call" by a slum-dwellers' committee, which she'd only joined in the hope that they'd sponsor one of her projects. This was before she'd made the conscious decision not to desire an audience for any of her art, rendering its quota of computing time relative to any other process irrelevant.

Hawthorne's only contact since his death had been brief recorded messages from ex-friends, ex-lovers, ex-relations and ex-colleagues, all more or less bidding him farewell, as if he'd embarked on a one-way voyage to a place beyond the reach of modern communications. There'd also been an offer of counseling from his scanning clinic's Resurrection Trauma expert system -- first ten subjective minutes absolutely free. When Kate had appeared on his communications screen, synched to his time rate and talking back, he'd poured out his soul to her.

She'd persuaded him to postpone baling out until he'd considered the alternatives. She hadn't had to argue hard; the mere fact of her presence had already improved his outlook immeasurably. Thousands of Copies, she'd said, survived with slowdown factors of thirty, sixty, or worse -- playing no part in human society, earning no money but the passive income from their trust funds, living at their own speed, defining their worth on their own terms. He had nothing to lose by trying it himself.

And if he couldn't accept that kind of separatist existence? He always had the choice of suspending himself, in the hope that the economics of ontology would eventually shift in his favor -- albeit at the risk of waking to find that he'd matched speeds with a world far stranger, far harder to relate to, than the present in fast motion.

For someone whose fondest hope had been to wake in a robot body and carry on living as if nothing had changed, the slums were a shock. Kate had shown him around the Slow Clubs -- the meeting places for Copies willing to synch to the rate of the slowest person present. Not a billionaire in sight. At the Cabaret Andalou, the musicians presented as living saxophones and guitars, songs were visible, tangible, psychotropic radiation blasting from the mouths of the singers -- and on a good night, a strong enough sense of camaraderie, telepathy, synergy, could by the mutual consent of the crowd take over, melting away (for a moment) all personal barriers, mental and mock-physical, reconstructing audience and performers into a single organism: one hundred eyes, two hundred limbs, one giant neural net resonating with the memories, perceptions and emotions of all the people it had been.