“Who is Voltaire?” he called to the streaming gridded emptiness.

No reply.

His itch was still with him. And the yawning nothing all around. He decided to fix the larger issue. What had Pascal said?

The silence of these spaces terrifies me.

He probed and gouged and sought. And in the doing, knew that as his hands dug into the ebony stuff all about him, they were but metaphors. Symbols for programs he could never have created himself.

He had inherited these abilities-much as he had, as a boy, inherited hands. Down below his conscious Self, his minions had labored upon the base Volt 1.0, plus Marq’s augmentations.

He pulled apart the blackness and stepped through. To a city street.

He was puffing, weak, strained. Resources running low.

He walked shakily into a restaurant-anonymous, plain, food merely standing on counters-and stuffed himself.

He concentrated on each step. By making each portion of his experience well up, he found that he could descend through the layers of his own response.

Making his body feel right demanded sets of overlapping rules. As he chewed, teeth had to sink into food, saliva squirt to greet the munched mass, enzymes start to work to extract the right nutrient ratios-else it would not seem real.

His programs, he saw, bypassed the involved stomach and colon processes. Such intricacies were needless. Instead, the “software” (odd phrase) simplified all the messy innards into a result he could feel-a satisfying concentration of tasty blood sugars, giving him a carbohydrate lift, a pleasant electrolyte balance, hormones and stabilizers all calculated, with a patchwork of templates for the appropriate emotional levels.

All other detail was discarded, once the subroutines got the right effect, simulating the tingling of nerve endings. Not too bad for what was really a block of ferrite and polymer, each site in its crystal complexity an individual, furiously working microprocessor.

Still, he felt as though he had been hollowed out by an intense, sucking vacuum.

Voltaire rushed out of the restaurant. The street! He needed to see this place, to check his suspicions.

Down the placid avenues he lurched. Run, stride!

Even though reckless, he never accidentally fell. Inspection of his inner layers showed that this was because his peripheral vision extended beyond 180 degrees, taking everything in. So he was literally seeing behind his head-though he did not consciously register this.

Real people, he suddenly saw, negotiated steps while chattering to each other by making snapshot comparisons of their peripheral vision; they were acutely sensitive to sudden changes in silhouettes and trajectories. Balance and walking were so critical to humans that his programming overdid its caution.

He had to teeter far out on his toes before he could fall on his face -smack!-andeven then it didn’t hurt much.

Once there, he let a passerby walk over him. A girl-a nominal girl, the phrase leapt to mindstepped on him.

This time he cringed at the downward spike of her heels…and felt nothing. He scrambled after her. Some elementary portion of himself had feared the pain.

So it had eliminated it. Which meant that experience was no longer a constraint.

“The spirit has won a divorce from the body! “ he announced to the people passing by. Stolid, they paid him no heed.

But this was his simulation!

Outraged, he caught up to the methodical girl and jumped powerfully onto her shoulders. No effect. He rode her down the street. The girl strode on obliviously as he danced on her head. The apparently fragile sim-girl was a recorded patch-in, as solid and remorseless as rock.

He danced down the street by leaping from head to head. Nobody noticed; every head felt firm, a smoothly gliding platform.

So the entire street was backdrop, no better than it had to be. The crowd did not repeat as a whole, but three times he saw the same elderly woman making her crabbed way on the slidewalk, on the exact same route, with the identical shopping bag.

It was eerie, watching people passing by and knowing that they were as unreachable as a distant star. No, even less; the Empire had stars aplenty.

And how did he know that?

Voltaire felt knowledge unfold in him like a dense matting, a cloak wrapping him.

Suddenly, he itched. Not a mere vexation, but a wave of terrible tingling that swept in waves over his entire body. Indeed, inside his body.

He ran down the street, swatting at himself. The physical gesture should stimulate his subselves, make them solve this problem. It did not.

Prickly pain sheeted over his skin. It danced like St. Elmo’s fire, a natural phenomenon akin to ball lightning-or so a subself blithely informed him, as if he desired

“Library learning!” he shouted. “Not that! I want-”

Your fine astronomers can find the distance of the stars, and their temperatures and metal content. But how do they find out what their true names are?

The voice spoke without sound. It reverberated not in his ears but in mind. He felt cold fear at the blank strangeness of the flat, humorless tone. It chilled him.

“Who jokes?”

No answer.

“Who, damn you?” Joan had termed the blankness an It.

He hurried on, but felt eyes everywhere.

Marq listened tensely as Mac 500’s neutral voice recounted the latest outbreak of computer virus.

Heavy harvesting equipment had malfunctioned at forty-six global sites. Reports of additional incidents continued to pour in. Attempting to check an emerging pattern of aberrant behavior, Trantor authorities called in repair tiktoks from regional service stations. Instead of servicing the equipment, they formed themselves before the malf’ed tiktoks and began to utter incantations in a tortured language their programmers had never heard before.

After virtually identical incidents in many layers of Trantorian society, sample tiktoks showed chaotic programming nodes. Or it seemed to be chaotic. But how could random error lead to the same behavior?

Linguists studied the babbling for resemblances to known languages, ancient or modem. NO correlation was found.

Marq shook his head, studying the incoming data. “Damned madness, this stuff,” he muttered. His simscreens swirled with images like a confusion of blown autumn leaves.

“Whole world food supply’s in danger. No fresh fruit, ratty old vegetables.” He eyed with distaste the bowl of plankton soup at his elbow. “I’m sick of it!”

Bad enough being in hiding. Bad enough Nim had double-crossed them. Bad enough he couldn’t find Joan or Voltaire.

“I’m sick of eating cardboard junk!” He swept the soup away, spattering the floor of their shabby cube.

Voltaire watched Marq gripe, tossing the half-finished meal into the trash.

He had learned how to insinuate himself into the communications web of others, though it took a kind of squeezing he found irksome. Somehow he could fathom the hard, real world better from this cool, abstract frame.

Voltaire watched Marq in two simultaneous modes: the man’s image, as he sat in his simauditorium, and through the many linkages Marq had to the data-world.

From these he quickly saw Trantor as Marq did, in all its glory and grime. It was an obliging sensation, like being in several places at once. And he felt (or thought he did) the man’s depths of concern.

He could view Marq by inverting the image-gathering system of Marq’s own holo grid. As he listened to the ill-bred whining, he could also suck from Marq’s immense database a summary of recent tiktok travesties, and beneath that, background, smart-filtered by obliging microprograms, for the moment.

He learned that the one kilowatt per square meter of sunlight caught by Trantor was converted to food in vast photofarms-essentially, growing great gray sheets of unappetizing stuff on the rooftops of the worldcity-but the major energy source was the thermal pumps which harnessed the smoldering magma beneath. Impressive, the ruby-hot masses tended by gorgon tiktoks (how inappropriate the name seemed, applied to mammoth machines}-but he could discern no cause to all the interruptions now racing like thunderstorms of chaos over the manylayered faces of Trantor.