Kate had shown him some of the environments she'd bought -- and some she'd built herself -- where she lived and worked in solitude. An overgrown, oversized, small-town back garden in early summer, an enhanced and modified childhood memory, where she carved solid sculptures out of nothing but the ten-to-the-ten-thousandth possibilities of color, texture and form. A bleak gray stretch of shoreline under eternally threatening clouds, the sky dark oil on canvas, a painting come to life, where she went to calm herself when she chose not to make the conscious decision to be calm.

She'd helped him redesign his apartment, transforming it from a photorealist concrete box into a system of perceptions which could be as stable, or responsive, as he wished. Once, before sleep, he'd wrapped the structure around himself like a sleeping bag, shrinking and softening it until the kitchen cradled his head and the other rooms draped his body. He'd changed the topology so that every window looked in through another window, every wall abutted another wall; the whole thing closed in on itself in every direction, finite but borderless, universe-as-womb.

And Kate had introduced him to Daniel Lebesgue's interactive philosophical plays: The Beholder, The Sane Man (his adaptation of Pirandello's Enrico TV), and, of course, Solipsist Nation. Hawthorne had taken the role of John Beckett, a reluctant Copy obsessed with keeping track of the outside world -- who ends up literally becoming an entire society and culture himself. The play's software hadn't enacted that fate upon Hawthorne -- intended for visitors and Copies alike, it worked on the level of perceptions and metaphors, not neural reconstruction. Lebesgue's ideas were mesmerizing, but imprecise, and even he had never tried to carry them through -- so far as anyone knew. He'd vanished from sight in 2036; becoming a recluse, baling out, or suspending himself, nobody could say. His disciples wrote manifestos, and prescriptions for virtual Utopias; in the wider vernacular, though, to be "Solipsist Nation" simply meant to have ceased deferring to the outside world.

Three subjective weeks -- almost four real-time years -- after his resurrection, Hawthorne had stepped off the merry-go-round long enough to catch up with the news from outside. There'd been nothing especially dramatic or unexpected in the summaries -- no shocking political upheavals, no stunning technological breakthroughs, no more nor less civil war or famine than in the past. The BBC's headlines of the day: Five hundred people had died in storms in southeast England. The European Federation had cut its intake of environmental refugees by forty percent. Korean investors had gone ahead with a threatened embargo on US government bonds, as part of a trade war over biotechnology tariffs, and utilities had begun disconnecting power, water and communications services from federal buildings. Up-to-the-minute details notwithstanding, it had all seemed as familiar as some brand-name breakfast food: the same texture, the same taste, as he remembered from four, from eight, years before. With his eyes locked on the terminal in front of him, the oddly soothing generic images drawing him in, the three hallucinatory weeks of dancing saxophones and habitable paintings had receded into insignificance, as if they'd been nothing but a vivid dream. Or at least something on another channel, with no risk of being mistaken for news.

Kate had said, "You know, you can sit here forever, watch this forever, if that's what you want. There are Copies -- we call them Witnesses -- who refine themselves into . . . systems . . . which do nothing but monitor the news, as thoroughly as their slowdown allows. No bodies, no fatigue, no distractions. Pure observers, watching history unfold."

"That's not what I want."

He hadn't taken his eyes off the screen, though. Inexplicably, he'd started to cry, softly, grieving for something that he couldn't name. Not the world defined by the news systems; he'd never inhabited that place. Not the people who'd sent him their recorded farewells; they'd been useful at the time, but they meant nothing to him anymore.

"But?"

"But outside is still what's real to me -- even if I can't be a part of it. Flesh and blood. Solid ground. Real sunlight. It's still the only world that matters, in the end. I can't pretend I don't know that. Everything in here is just beautiful, inconsequential fiction." Including you. Including me.

Kate had said, "You can change that."

"Change what? Virtual Reality is Virtual Reality. I can't transform it into something else."

"You can change your perspective. Change your attitudes. Stop viewing your experiences here as less than real."

"That's easier said than done."

"But it isn't."

She'd summoned up a control panel, shown him the software he could use: a program which would analyze his model-of-a-brain, identify his qualms and misgivings about turning his back on the world -- and remove them.

"A do-it-yourself lobotomy."

"Hardly. There's no 'physical' excision. The program carries out trial-and-error adjustment of synaptic weights, until it finds the minimum possible alteration which achieves the desired goal. A few billion short-lived stripped-down versions of your brain will be tested and discarded along the way, but don't let that bother you."

"You've run this on yourself?"

She'd laughed. "Yes. Out of curiosity. But it found nothing to change in me. I'd already made up my mind. Even on the outside, I knew this was what I wanted."

"So . . . I press a button and there's someone new sitting here? One instant synthetic satisfied customer? I annihilate myself, just like that?"

"You're the one who jumped off a cliff."

"No. I'm the one who didn't."

"You won't 'annihilate yourself.' You'll only change as much as you have to. And you'll still call yourself David Hawthorne. What more can you ask for? What more have you ever done?"

They'd talked it through for hours, debating the fine philosophical and moral points; the difference between "naturally" accepting his situation, and imposing acceptance upon himself. In the end, though, when he'd made the decision, it had seemed like just another part of the dream, just another inconsequential fiction. In that sense, the old David Hawthorne had been true to his beliefs -- even as he rewired them out of existence.

Kate had been wrong about one thing. Despite the perfect continuity of his memories, he'd felt compelled to mark the transition by choosing a new name, plucking the whimsical monosyllable out of thin air.

The "minimum possible alteration"? Perhaps if he had ended up less radically Solipsist Nation, far more of his personality would have to have been distorted for him to have been convinced at all. A few bold necessary cuts had squared the circle, instead of a thousand finicky mutilations.

That first change, though, had cleared the way for many more, a long series of self-directed mutations. Peer (by choice) had no patience with nostalgia or sentimentality; if any part of his personality offended him, he struck it out. Some traits had (most likely) vanished forever: a horde of petty jealousies, vanities, misgivings and pointless obsessions; a tendency to irrational depression and guilt. Others came and went. Peer had acquired, removed and restored a variety of talents, mood predispositions and drives; cravings for knowledge, art and physical experience. In a few subjective days, he could change from an ascetic bodiless student of Sumerian archaeology, to a hedonistic gastronome delighting in nothing more than the preparation and consumption of lavishly simulated feasts, to a disciplined practitioner of Shotokan karate.

A core remained; certain values, certain emotional responses, certain aesthetic sensibilities had survived these transitions unscathed.