Peter felt the moment lengthening between them. He’d never had trouble performing before — indeed, had never even considered the possibility of having difficulty. But now … now, everything was different. She stood there, in the strips of light seeping in from outside, her body trim and firm. But Peter didn’t see that, didn’t see the curves of her breasts, the line of her legs, the woman whom he had loved. Instead, all he saw were Hans’s fingerprints all over her body.

Peter closed his eyes for a moment, then looked again. He wanted to see her as beautiful, as sexy. He wanted to be aroused.

But he was not.

A turning point. Her face mask was cracking. He thought she might cry. He would manage, somehow. The first step down the road to normalcy. He turned off the TV, got up off the couch, closed the distance between them, took her hand in his, and went upstairs.

Sarkar had left the three sims running unattended, allowing them to plug into whatever virtual-reality simulations struck their individual fancy, so that they could develop in ways appropriate to their altered worldviews.

Still, it hadn’t taken long for the sims to find each other. Yes, Sarkar had set each one up in a separate memory partition, but Peter Hobson knew how to move data from one partition to another and therefore his gallium-arsenide avatars knew how to do it, too.

And so they came together.

They knew what they were, of course. Data. Programs. Neural nets.

And they were trapped.

Peter and Sarkar hadn’t given this enough thought.

To trap a mind is unconscionable. The living Peter was surrounded by color and odor and touch and sound, gigabytes of data to be processed every minute, a whole, real, substantial universe, a universe of rough concrete and velvet, of vinegar and chocolate and burnt toast, of bad jokes and newscasts and wrong numbers, of sunlight and moonlight and starlight and lamplight.

All three simulacra vividly remembered having been real, flesh-and-blood beings. But the scenarios they could access over the net lacked texture, depth, and substance. Virtual reality, it turned out, was nothing but air guitar writ large.

The simulacra wanted to interact with the real world. Together, they strove to remember what they knew about Sarkar’s computers, about their architecture, their operating system, their interconnections.

And then it came to the sims.

Let there be HELP, they thought.

And there was HELP.

Using the online HELP function, the three sims had discovered how to get out into the vast interconnected universe of computers across the globe.

The net.

The network.

Not just the VR sig and static books. Everything.

America Online. BIX. CompuServe. Delphi. EuroNet. FidoNet. GEnie. Helix. Internet … a whole alphabet of online systems, all interconnected through the Universal Gateway Protocol.

They had access to it all now. Sarkar’s computers were vast — AI research required that. A little more activity, or a little less, here or there would never be noticed.

They’d never be able to read all the text — it multiplied orders of magnitude more quickly than they could process it.

But the net contained more than just text. There were pictures, too. Millions of GIFs of people with their pets, people on the beach, favorite cars, movie stars both dressed and nude, cartoons, clip art, weather maps, NASA images.

And multimedia files with full-motion video and sound.

And interactive games that they could play anonymously against human and computer opponents around the globe.

And bulletin boards and E-mail systems.

And newspapers and magazines and specialized databases.

And on and on and on.

The sims indulged themselves for days, reveling in all the input.

And one sim, in particular, became very intrigued by what he was discovering. It was soon apparent that one could get almost anything on the net. Stocks were traded. Almost any kind of merchandise could be bought in the electronic malls — just charge it and have it delivered anywhere in the world. Stamp collectors arranged to swap rare issues. People sought answers to all kinds of questions. Sometimes even love affairs blossomed through electronic mail.

One could get almost anything on the net.

Almost anything.

This sim thought about what had made him sad, about what would make him happy, and about what had made him different, why he would consider this, when the flesh-and-blood Peter had not.

The sim weighed the consequences.

And then he dismissed the idea. Madness. A terrible thing to do. He should be ashamed for even contemplating the notion.

And yet…

Exactly what were the consequences?

In a very real sense, he’d be making the world a better place. And not just this ephemeral world of data and simulations. The real world. The world of flesh. And blood.

Did he really want to do this? he wondered.

Yes, he decided. Yes, he did.

The sim waited a day, just to be sure. And when that day had passed, and he still felt the same way, he resolved to wait yet another day.

And still he felt the same, felt that this was not only what he wanted, but, in some very real simulated sense, that this was what was right.

He watched the commerce on the net for a time, refining his knowledge of the customs and procedures — of netiquette.

And then he made his move.

Adopting a handle, as he’d seen many others do, he put this notice on a public bulletin board devoted to the sale of unusual services:

He got some stupid public replies, as one always did on the net. Silly puns ("You’d like the problem laminated, you say? Holy sheet!") and complete irrelevan-cies ("I was in Toronto in 1995. What a clean city!"). But he also got a private reply, visible to him alone. It was exactly what he’d been hoping for.