“Kevin,” Judy said, “why don’t you unblank the suits? Stop playing games. Show Helen what you want her to see.”

“Stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here,” Helen shouted.

The two suits flickered and then became transparent. Everyone was looking at Helen. Judy, Kevin, and the other Helen.

“That’s me,” Helen said, gazing at the figure in the spacesuit that floated beside Kevin. It was her. A little older, a little plumper, and with her hair dyed black, but definitely her. “That’s me,” she repeated.

“I’m not you,” the other said, “not anymore. I’m Bairn.”

“You’re both from the same template,” Kevin said. “Training you is the ultimate challenge, Helen.”

Helen turned to Judy, who was watching her with cool interest.

“Still looking, Judy?” she asked bitterly.

Judy’s glittering eyes slid back towards Kevin. “Okay,” she said. “You’ve had your fun. Why do you want to talk about David Schummel?”

Helen couldn’t help gazing at Bairn. She could see crow’s feet forming around her eyes, see cellulite appearing on her thighs. She guessed the other was what-five, ten years older? Was that how long it would take to break her-Helen’s-spirit? Kevin was still watching her, she noticed. Enjoying the moment.

She gave a shudder. She wasn’t going to give him the pleasure. Recriminations could come later. For the moment, the best way to have revenge on him was to help Judy.

“You were asked a question,” she said, her voice very calm. “Tell us about David Schummel.”

Kevin smirked and turned to the figure floating by him. “You used to speak to me like that, Bairn, remember? Back when you could still get angry with me?”

“I remember, Kevin.”

Helen felt horror tinged with disgust. That was her, floating over there, spirit broken and enslaved to Kevin’s will. She wanted to lash out at something.

“Are you enjoying this, Judy?” she shouted.

Judy ignored Helen’s outburst. “You’re still wasting time, Kevin. What do you want?”

“I once had David Schummel, but the Watcher took him from me. Now that you have helped me to find him again, I want you to know what it is he represents.”

“We helped you to find him?” Helen said.

Kevin ignored her. “Do you know he carried a private processing space with him to Gateway?”

“What is Gateway?” Helen interrupted.

Judy waved a hand to silence her, but Kevin answered.

“One of the Watcher’s failed projects, Helen. Its Achilles heel. What is the Watcher, Helen, but an intelligence? On Gateway there exists something that destroys intelligence.”

“But why would anyone wish to destroy the Watcher?” Judy asked. “It is the guardian of humankind.”

“You don’t really believe that, Judy. It’s a cuckoo. Sheltering in our world, consuming our resources while it shapes its environment to its own end. And soon it will be pushing the other chicks from the nest. Look around, Judy. What do you see?”

“I see the Shawl.”

Black rectangles hanging in lines, perspective funneling their edges to an imaginary point somewhere in the clouds of the blue Earth below.

“You see the Shawl?” Kevin said. “This isn’t the real Shawl! This is a virtual construction! This exists only in processing spaces! The virtual Shawl is much bigger than the real one. It’s a message, a way of keeping us in check.”

“How?”

“How does any dictator keep its subjects in check? By fear, of course!”

Helen was fascinated, despite herself.

“Fear? Of what?”

“What are all humans frightened of? Dying. What am I not afraid of and have proved it time and again? Death. Fear of death holds humans in place. And yet, possessing virtual lives, we could live forever. The Watcher has made us all forget this. It has written birth and death throughout our universe and perpetuated the myth of a soul. That’s what makes you think that you are different than that Helen over there-Bairn.”

“I am different from her.”

“You are now, but what about one second after awakening? Two seconds? Five minutes? I tell you: only by being reborn will you truly live again.”

Judy spoke: “You are ripping off old religious texts and getting the meaning completely backwards.”

“If you say so, Judy,” Kevin said. “Let’s go inside and speak properly.” He smiled at Helen. “Promise you won’t be silly?”

Helen’s suit had no motion poppers. Judy tethered Helen to her own suit, then towed her into a nearby section of the Shawl. She noticed that Kevin did the same with Bairn.

They stood in a grey room with a picture of a man with his back to them on one wall. Helen looked around for something that she could use as a weapon. Nothing. She would have to create her own. Bairn was watching her. Helen smiled sweetly and sat down on the floor, tucking her legs underneath herself. She was still naked. She didn’t care.

Kevin began speaking. “David Schummel was a pilot on the Gateway expedition. They couldn’t use AIs out there because they kept committing suicide. They had to use human pilots. Some still exist, even today. Hobbyists. You know the sort of thing?”

Judy nodded.

“David liked to watch, too, Judy.” Kevin smiled significantly. “He had a little processing space all of his own. At night, when his duties were over, he liked to sit in his room and take a look at what was going on in there.”

“What was in there?” Helen asked.

“Does it matter? But I’ll tell you one thing that is always in those little boxes. Me. Zinman was right, Judy. I’m always there. It begins with just a look, but the observer always gets drawn in. In the end, they always want to become part of the processing space themselves, and then…well…”

“You own them?” Judy said.

“I own everybody in the end,” Kevin replied. “Everyone who cares to take a look. That’s how I come to know so much. Sooner or later, everyone will have met me.”

“Not everyone,” Helen said.

“Everyone who has had a personality construct made,” Kevin said earnestly.

It wasn’t much, as personal spaces go. It only had capacity for a maximum of eight personality constructs. Not that it mattered, because David Schummel only had one stored in there: Madeleine. An ex-girlfriend. In a fit of jealous pique, he had requested that the Private Network make this copy of her just after she had walked out on him. If he couldn’t have her, then no one else could. That aspect of her, anyway.

David had never let Madeleine see him, he just liked to watch from a distance, but she had guessed anyway. In the early days she had shouted and screamed, “Schummel, you wanker, it’s over! Let me go.” But that had been then. As the weeks turned to months and the months turned to years, she had resigned herself to her fate, just as David had come to realize the immaturity of his actions in bottling her up in the first place. But what could he do? To release her into a public processing space would simply draw the attention of the EA to his crime.

Now Madeleine had become David’s talisman. He carried her processing space everywhere-even to Gateway. How could he be separated from her? As for Madeleine, she just got on with her life. She had access to entertainment libraries, to a gym, even to a fairly decent Turing machine with which she could conduct conversations. David was too much of a coward to speak to her directly, even after all this time. Besides, he always did prefer just to watch.

So when David Schummel appeared in person in the processing space, the version of Kevin that had lurked, half asleep and unseen in the background, woke up and took notice.

Schummel’s avatar stood swaying in the small room. It smells in here, he thought abstractedly. Sweat and old food and damp. Doesn’t she clean up after herself? How can she live like this? His mind was reeling, trying to avoid thinking about what was happening outside in the atomic world.