He pulled the osmosis mask free and breathed in the rich scent of the ocean again.

“What, oh mighty-lunged one?” replied Moira in soft tones. Her sleepingskin bag was about four feet away.

“If I use the touch-sharing function with my wife—with Ada—when I get home, will my unborn child receive the information as well?”

“Counting your fetus chickens before they’re hatched, my young Prometheus?”

“Just answer the damned question, would you?”

“You’ll have to try it,” said Moira. “I don’t recall the design parameters right now and I haven’t ever touch-shared with preggoes, and we godlike post-humans can’t get pregnant—nor did it help in that department that we were all female—so give it a try if and when you get home. I do remember though that there were safety nets installed in the genetic touch-share function. You can’t pour harmful information to a fetus or a young child—replaying her own moment of conception, for instance. We don’t want the little tyke in therapy for thirty years, now do we?”

Harman ignored the sarcasm. He rubbed his stubbled cheeks. He’d shaved before starting on this trip—the thermskin cowl was less than comfortable over a beard, he’d learned on Prospero’s Isle more than ten months earlier—but two days of stubble rasped under his palm.

“You have all the functions you gave us?” he said to Moira, adding the rising inflection of the question mark at only the last instant.

“My dear,” purred Moira. “Do you think we’re fools? Are we going to give mere old-style humans some ability we lack?”

“So you have more than we do,” said Harman. “More than this hundred you built into us?”

Moira did not answer.

Harman had discovered complex nanocameras and audioreceivers built into his skin cells. Some DNA-bound protein bundles could store this visual and auditory data. Other cells had been altered into bioelectronic transmitters—good for only short range because they were powered just by his own cellular energy, but easily strong enough to be picked up and boosted and retransmitted.

“The turin drama,” he said aloud.

“What’s that?” Moira said sleepily. The post-human woman had been dozing.

“I realize how you transmitted the images from Ilium—or your transvestite god-sisters did—and how we were able to receive them through the turin cloths.”

“Well… duh,” said Moira and went back to sleep.

Harman saw how he would no longer need a turin cloth to receive such transmissions. Between logosphere voice-over protocols and this multimedia connection, he could share both voice and full sensory data with any other human being who volunteered to uplink the input stream.

What would that be like, linked to Ada, while we made love? wondered Harman and then chided himself for being a dirty old man. A horny, dirty old man, he corrected himself.

Besides the logosphere function, there was another function he could trigger that offered a complicated sensory interface with the biosphere. Since it was satellite-dependent and interdicted at the moment, he could only guess how it worked and what it felt like. Was it like a chat with Ariel or did a person suddenly become one with the dandelions and hummingbirds? Could he communicate directly and at a distance with the Little Green Men that way? Feeling serious again, Harman remembered Prospero saying that Ariel was using the LGM to hold off the thousands upon thousands of attacking calibani along the southern fringes of Old Europe, and he immediately saw how he could use such a connection to ask the zeks for help fighting the voynix.

All this function-searching was giving Harman a worse headache. Almost by accident, he checked his medical monitor function and saw that indeed, his adrenaline levels and blood pressure combined was high enough to give him the headache he’d suffered with for two weeks now. He activated another medical function—this one more active than mere monitoring—and tentatively allowed some chemicals to be released into his system. Blood vessels in his neck dilated and relaxed. Warmth flowed back into his icy fingertips. The headache receded.

A teenaged boy could really use this function to chase away unwanted erections, thought Harman. He realized that he really was a horny, dirty old man.

Not so old, really, thought Harman. The medical monitor had told him that he had the physical body of an average slightly out-of-shape thirty-one-year-old man.

Other functions floated onto his mental checklist: figure-ground enhancement, enhanced empathy, another that he thought of as the berserker function—a temporary spiking of adrenaline and all other physical and strength-multiplying abilities, probably to be used as a last resort in a fight or if one had to lift a ton or two off one’s child. Besides the already used and misused memory replay function, Harman saw that replay data inputted through someone else’s sharing function. There was a function that would allow him to put his body into a sort of hibernation, a temporary slowing of everything to the point of stasis. He realized that this wasn’t a quick way to catch a nap but designed to be used with something like the crystal coffin in the Taj Moira if one needed to remain alive but inert for long periods of time—in Moira’s case, very long periods of time—without suffering bedsores, muscle atrophy, morning breath, and the other side effects of normal human unconsciousness. Harman saw at once that the real Savi had used this function many times in her time crèche on the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu and elsewhere to survive and thrive over the fourteen centuries of her hiding from the voynix and the post-humans.

There were many more functions—some of them intriguing beyond words—but the concentration necessary to explore them was bringing back Harman’s headache. He shut down that part of his brain for the night.

Immediately more powerful sensory information flowed in. The surge of waves far above. A photoluminescent-phytoplanktonish glow in the upper strata of the Atlantic that looked like an underwater aurora borealis to his tired eyes.

The sky over the ocean was also alive with light—not air-to-sea lightning this time but internal cloud lightning, silent explosions showing the fractal complexity of the churning clouds as lit from within. These pulses and explosions of light were silent—not the slightest hint of thunder reaching his little sleeping bag on the bottom of the Atlantic Breach—so Harman crossed his arms behind his head and just enjoyed the light show, also appreciating the effect of the cloud lightning on the still-churning surface of the ocean.

Patterns. Patterns everywhere. All of nature and the universe dancing at the edge of chaos, reprieved by fractal boundaries and a billion hidden algorithmic protocols hardwired into everything and every interaction, but beautiful nonetheless—oh, so beautiful. He realized that there was at least one function he hadn’t really explored that could sort out most of these patterns for him, far better than mere evolved human senses and sensibilities could, but it would probably be an interdicted function requiring ring-connections, and besides… Harman didn’t need a genetically enhanced function to appreciate the pure beauty of this silent mid-Atlantic show that was being put on just for him.

He lay on the floor of the Breach, hands behind his head, and said a prayer for Ada and his possible son or daughter. (Her functions, when activated, would tell her which it was.) He wished he could be with her now. He prayed to the God he’d never really thought about—to the Quiet God whom Setebos and his lackey Caliban feared above all else according to what the monster had blurted out on Prospero’s Isle—and he prayed only that his beloved Ada would remain well and alive and as happy as the terrible circumstances of these times and their separation across space would allow.