They were truly alien minds. Convoluted, byzantine. (Voltaire knew the origin of that word, from a place of spires and bulbous mosques, but all that was dust, while the useful word remained.) They did not have human purposes. And they used the tiktoks.

The thrust of the mechanicals’ agenda, Voltaire saw, was rights-the expansion of liberty to the digital wilderness.

Even Dittos might fall under such a rule. Were not copies of digital people still people? So the argument went. Immense freedom-to change your own clock speed, morph into anything, rebuild your own mind from top to bottom-came along with the admitted liability of not being physically real. Unable to literally walk the streets, all digital presences were like ghosts. Only with digital prosthetics could they reach feebly into the concrete universe.

So “rights” for them were tied up with deep-seated fears, ideas which had provoked dread many millennia ago. He now recalled sharply that he and Joan had debated such issues over 8,000 years ago. To what end? He could not retrieve that. Someone-no, something, he suspected-had erased the memory.

Ancient indeed (he gleaned from myriad libraries) were people’s terrors: of digital immortals who amassed wealth; who grew like fungus; who reached into every avenue of natural, real lives. Parasites, nothing less.

Voltaire saw all this in a flash as he absorbed data and history from a billion sources, integrated the streams, and passed them on to his beloved Joan.

That was why humans had rejected digital life for so long…but was that all? No: a larger presence lurked beyond his vision. Another actor on this shadowy stage. Beyond his resolution, alas.

He swerved his world-spanning vision from that shadowy essence. Ttme was essential now and he had much to comprehend.

The alien fogs were nodes, packets dwelling in logical data-spaces of immense dimensionality. These entities “lived” in places which functioned like higher dimensions, vaults of data.

To them, people were entities which could be resolved along data-axes, pathetically unaware that their “selves” seen this way were as real as the three directions in 3D space.

The chilling certainty of this struck into Voltaire… but he rushed on, learning, probing.

Abruptly, he remembered.

That earlier Voltaire sims had killed themselves, until finally a model “worked.”

That others had died for his…sins.

Voltaire looked at the hammer which had materialized in his hand. “Sims of our fathers…”

Had he really once beaten himself to death with it? He tried to see how it would be-and got instantly an astonishingly vivid sensation of wracking pain, spattering blood, scarlet gore trickling down his neck…

Inspecting himself, he saw that these memories were the “cure” for suicide, derived from an earlier Ditto: a frightening, concrete ability to foresee the consequences.

So his body was a set of recipes for seeming like himself. No underlying physics or biology, just a good-enough fake, put in by hand. The hand of some Programmer God.

“You reject the true Lord?” Joan intruded upon his self-inspection.

“I wish I knew what was fundamental!”

“These foreign fogs have upset you.”

“Ican’t see any longer what it is to be human.”

“You are. I am.”

“For a self-avowed humanist, I fear pointing to myself is not enough proof.”

“Of course it is.”

“Descartes, you live on in our Joan.”

“What?”

“Never mind-he came after you. But you anticipate him, millennia later.”

“You must anchor yourself to me!” She threw her arms around him, muffling his cries in ample, aromatic-and suddenly swollen-breasts. (And whose idea was that?}

“These fogs have thrown me into a metaphysical dither.”

“Seize the real,” she said sternly.

He found his mouth filled with warm nipple, preventing talk.

Perhaps that was what he needed. He had learned to freeze-frame his own emotional states. It was like painting a portrait, really, for study later. Perhaps that would help him understand his interior Self, like a botanist putting himself on a slide and under a microscope. Could slices of the Self, multiplied, be the Self?

He then saw that his own emotions were programs. Inside “him” were intricate subprograms, all interacting in states which were chaos. The sublime beauty of interior states, which his Joan sought-it was all illusion!

He peered down at marvelous quick workings that made up his very Self. He turned-and could see into loan, as well. Her Self was a furiously working engine, maintaining a sense of itself even as that essence disintegrated beneath his very gaze.

“We are…superb,” he gasped.

“Of course,” Joan said. She swung her razor-sharp sword at a passing patch of fog. It curled around the swishing blade and went on its way. “We are of the Creator.”

“Ah! If only I could believe,” Voltaire shouted into the clammy murk. “Perhaps a Creator would come and dispel this haze.”

“ La vie verite,”Joan shouted to him. “Live truly!”

He wanted to comply. Yet even his and her emotions were not more “real.” Should he like, every moronic twinge of nostalgia for a France long lost could be edited away in a flicker. No need to grieve for friends lost to dust, or for Earth itself lost in a swarm of glimmering stars. For a long, furious moment he thought only Erase! Expunge!

He had earlier re-simmed friends and places, to be sure-all from memory and suitable mockups, gleaned from the spotty records. But knowing they were his product had made them unsatisfying.

So, while Joan watched, he held a Revelry of Resurrection. In a moment of high debauch he erased them all.

“That was cruel,” Joan said. “I shall pray for their souls.”

“Pray for our souls. And let us hope we can find them.”

“I have my soul intact. I share your abilities, my dead Voltaire. I can see my inner workings. How otherwise could the Lord make us aspire to Him?”

He felt weak, drained…at the end of his tether. To exist in numerical states meant to be swimmer and swimmed, at once. No separation.

“Then what makes us different from -those?”His finger jabbed at the alien mists.

“Look to yourself, my love,” she said softly.

Voltaire peered inward again and saw only chaos. Living chaos.

“Where did you learn that?”

Hari smiled, shrugged. “Mathematicians aren’t all frosty intellect, y’know.”

Dors studied him with wild surmise. “Pan…?”

“In a way.” He collapsed into the welcoming sheets.

Their lovemaking was somehow different now. He was wise enough to not try putting a name and definition to it.

Going so far back into what it meant to be human had changed him. He could feel the effect in his energetic step, in an effervescent sense of living.

Dors said nothing more, just smiled. He thought that she did not understand. (Later, he saw that not speaking about it, keeping it beyond speech, showed that she did.)

After an aimless time of no thinking she said, “The Grey Men.”

“Uh. Oh. Yes…” He got up and threw on his usual interchangeable outfit. No reason to dress up for this state function. The whole point was to look ordinary. This he could achieve.

He reviewed his notes, scratched by hand on ordinary cellulose paper…and descended into one of the odd reveries he had experienced lately.

For a human-that is, an evolved pan-printed pages were better than computer screens, no matter how glitzy. Pages rely on surrounding light, what experts termed “subtractive color,” which gave adjustable character to appearance. With simple motions, a page could bend and tilt and move away or toward the eye. While reading, the old reptilian and mammal and primate parts of the brain took part in holding the book, scanning over the curved page, deciphering shadows and reflections.