“Did you, by any chance, take the trouble to manufacture any liquor for us?” I asked. “Adam Zimmerman’s probably going to expect champagne and cognac when he wakes up, but I could be content with a decent bourbon.”

“Adam Zimmerman only drank red wine,” she informed me.

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” I said. Tired of being polite, I pushed the plate away, although the effect of the gesture was ruined by the lack of available space on the flat ledge that the smart wall had extruded to serve as a dining table.

I ran my fingers over the surface of the wall, speculatively. “How clever is this stuff?” I asked.

“Not very,” was the unhelpful reply — but Davida repented of her surliness almost immediately. “It can mold itself to any purpose you might require,” she said. “If you need a cocoon in which to sleep, or to immerse yourself in VE…although you’ll probably find a hood appropriate to most purposes.”

“Not exactly a utility mist, then.” I said.

She didn’t recognise the term, so I elaborated. “PicoCon’s bolder admen used to look forward to a day when all the matter in the world except for humans would consist of a gray fog of nanomachines that would obligingly manufacture anything its masters desired, according to their command. At that point in future history the distinction between reality and Virtual Experience was expected to break down, because reality itself would be programmable. You don’t seem to have gone quite that far.”

“No,” she admitted. “There’s a sense in which the whole microworld is a single machine, of course, but most of its components are as functionally independent as the cells in your body, and as limited in their scope. Walls do what walls are equipped to do.”

“So there’s no central intelligence — no Microworld Mastermind?”

“There’s a hierarchy of managing AIs, culminating in a master supervisor, but there’s no central ego. The AIs aren’t authentically intelligent, individually or collectively. They don’t have self-conscious minds in the sense that you and I do.”

The silvery “artificial geniuses” of my day had seemed very smart to their users, and everyone had had an opinion as to whether they would one day make the evolutionary transition to self-consciousness and personality, but the real geniuses making and programming them had always assured us that it couldn’t and wouldn’t happen. Apparently, they’d been right. Excelsior might have a brain the size of a small planet, but if Davida could be believed it wasn’t home to a person.

“You might try something simpler,” I suggested, nodding toward the uneaten food. “Manna will do. There’s no need to try to make it more interesting. The culinary art is a lot more difficult than mere recipes imply.”

“I’m sorry,” Davida said, plaintively. “We’ll try to produce something more to your liking.”

“But not for my benefit,” I guessed, wryly. “This was another trial run, wasn’t it? You wouldn’t want Adam Zimmerman to react this way to his welcoming banquet, would you? I suppose you’ll want to let me try out a few more experimental meals before you set the menu for the big celebration. Or is the ship from Earth bringing supplies fit for a thousand-year-old messiah? Did you think to ask the UN to send a chef as well as an ambassador?”

“The ship that’s coming from Earth is a shuttle,” she told me, with just the slightest hint of resentment in her voice. “It has no cargo space, and only six cocoons. The ship from the outer system is much bigger, but the outer satellites produce their food in exactly the same way that we do, using artificial photosynthesis. We didn’t know that this problem would arise, and we’ll try to address it as best we can. We didn’t mean to cause you any distress.”

Having thought it over while she was speaking I pulled the plate back again and took another forkful. It still wasn’t good, but it was even less offensive than its predecessors.

“This fancy second skin you’ve fitted me with is already compensating, isn’t it?” I said. “All I have to do is keep shoveling the stuff in, and eventually I’ll get to like it.”

She didn’t seem certain. “Your internal technology is programmed to compensate for discomfort,” she admitted, “but not to substitute a positive reward. That would be dangerous.”

I nodded, to signify that I understood the distinction and the reasons for making it. One of the first uses to which experimental internal nanotech had been put was feeding the so-called pleasure areas in the hind brain. That way lay addiction, and severe distraction from the business of living. The systems that had been released on to the market in my day were supposed to be finely tuned to administer pain relief without blissing people out. The masters of PicoCon were firmly committed to the idea that people ought to earn their pleasures.

Even a dedicated rebel like me could see the sense in that. The only gratification worth having is the gratification of achievement, even if the achievement in question is the mere exercise of good taste.

I deduced, therefore, that I would get used to the food if I persisted, but I wouldn’t be forced to like it. I wondered how many other aspects of my second lifetime would be subject to the same principle. Perhaps I’d even get used to being a specimen in a zoo — but I certainly wasn’t going to learn to like it.

I ate a little more, but I really wasn’t hungry. I had other things on my mind.

“Can I take a look around now?” I asked my captor-in-chief. “Not through the picture-window — I’d like to look at Excelsior itself. The houses and the fields. The realwindows.”

“There are no real windows,” she told me. “Nor any fields. The artificial photosynthetic systems are like big black sails. There is a garden, but it’s sustained by artificial light. You’ll be able to see it tomorrow.”

There was no point in asking why I couldn’t see it today. I was still under close observation and they didn’t want to let me out of my cage just yet, not even for a stroll in the garden.

“How about a VE hood and access to your data banks?” I asked. “I’d like to read up on my history.”

“You only have to ask,” she said. Having seen the way she’d produced a dining table and a plateful of bad food I knew that shedidn’t even have to ask. She was IT-linked into a microworld-wide communication system that allowed her to issue commands and initiate semiautomatic responses almost unobtrusively — not just by forming the thought, I assumed, but certainly by means of carefully contrived subvocalizations. I didn’t have that kind of IT. I couldn’t give orders directly to the walls or the window — but if I spoke my requests aloud, someone would overhear, and decide whether or not to turn the request into a command.

I only had to ask, and anything within reason would be delivered to me…but I did have to ask, and anything my captors thought unreasonable would not be forthcoming. For the time being, the walls confining me would only produce an exit door for Davida Berenike Columella.

“I could be useful, you know,” I told her. “I was born two hundred years after Adam Zimmerman, from an artificial womb rather than a natural one, but I have a lot more in common with him than you do. By the same token, I have a lot more in common with you than he does. I could be a useful intermediary, if you let me. That might not be why you woke me up, but it’s a definite plus.”

Secretly, of course, I was hoping that it wasone of the reasons they’d woken me up — but I knew better than to take it for granted.

“Thank you for the offer,” she said.

For a moment she seemed almost human. I’d been brushed off in exactly that casual manner a hundred times before, though never by a nine-year-old. I knew that I’d have to try harder.

“I know how he’ll feel,” I told her, flatly. “You don’t. You think he’ll be grateful. You think you’ll be waking him up to tell him exactly what he always wanted to hear: that you can finally give him the emortality he craved. But I know how he’ll reallyfeel. That’s why I’ll be able to talk to him man to man. That’s why I’ll be the only one who can talk to him man to man.”