The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (3 page)

Instantly, her surroundings changed.

She was standing in the middle of a circle of people in an open meadow. Earthlike. With fourteen trillion people running around Cyberspace, you'd think a few of them would come up with something more imaginative than carbon copies of the Earth.
Poor quality
carbon copies at that,
natch
. There was a big hole in the ground, perhaps ten feet wide, at her feet.
A tall, youthfully handsome man stood across it from her, impeccably dressed and groomed. This was a bad sign, because appearances were cheap in Cyberspace. All it took was a word, and you could be young or old or thin or have different hair. You could change sex or race or even make yourself into an animal. Nobody was impressed by appearances any more. Nobody, at least, except for those of her generation who remembered what it was to be insecure, and the very young who hadn't figured out the score yet.
Caroline let her own body age naturally; when she reached her apparent late thirties, she had it restored to about age sixteen. This wasn't vanity; she couldn't maintain her athletic lifestyle if she allowed herself to get too old. She had been through the cycle dozens of times. Most people simply had themselves frozen at an age they found comfortable and left it at that, but Caroline preferred the occasional dramatic intervention. The first time she had regressed she hadn't been asked, and doing it this way helped remind her of that violation.
At the moment Caroline looked to be in her mid to late twenties. Her athletic build was the result of real exercise, her skills the result of real practice. She asked Prime Intellect for very little, and resented having to ask for that.
Caroline was naked. She had not worn clothes since the Change except for an occasional costume in a Death fantasy. She wore no makeup, and her long hair was an unkempt tangle. What was the point? A word to Prime Intellect could provide anything, fix anything, but none of those things it provided or fixed would be uniquely
hers
.
Which didn't mean Caroline refused to decorate her body at all. It just meant that she decorated it in signature style, without help from Prime Intellect.
"Welcome," he said. "I am Timothy. You are Caroline Hubert?"
"The one and only."
"An honor, then. And it is an honor for me to challenge you to accept Authentic Death."
"Proceed," Caroline mumbled.
Caroline looked around at the audience, and noticed that they were
all
wearing clothes. Worse, they were all wearing the same kind of clothes, casual dress that would not have been out of place in a Western city just before the Change. That was an even stronger sign she was in amateur territory. Caroline's
aesceticism
may have been extreme, but she was hardly alone in her belief that clothing was pointless for immortals. Any random grouping of people would normally include some pretty wide variations in fashion. Especially at Death exhibitions, which tended to attract loons and deviants like herself.
She felt an instant dislike for this kid. True, she felt an instant dislike for nearly anybody who participated in the sham that passed for reality in Cyberspace, but in Timothy's case the feeling was stronger than usual. This hate welled up within her unbidden like those other mysterious and powerful feelings, love and masochism and sexual attraction. He had a kind of natural charisma, and she could feel the small crowd orbiting around him. Females outnumbered the males by more than two to one. He probably had them all convinced he was a fucking genius, as if genius was a rare commodity in Cyberspace or as if it had anything to do.