Peter, still holding her hand, nodded. “I’m sure.”

“What’s it like?” she asked.

Peter wanted to tell her it was wonderful, tell her not to worry, tell her to be calm.

“I have no idea,” he said.

Sandra nodded slightly, accepting that. “I’ll know … soon enough,” she said.

Her eyelids drew shut. Peter, heart pounding, watched intently as she passed on, looking for any sign of the soulwave moving through the room.

There was nothing.

Back at Mirror Image, Sarkar loaded the recording into his workstation. He worked as fast as he could, feeding in images from the Dalhousie Stimulus Library. Then, at last, he was ready. With Peter standing over his shoulder, he activated the sim.

“Hello, Sandra,” he said. “This is Sarkar Muhammed.”

There was a long pause. Finally, tremulously, the speaker — incongruously using a male voice — said, “My God, is this what it’s like to be dead?”

“Kind of,” said Sarkar. “You are the other one — the simulation we spoke about.”

Wistful: “Oh.”

“Forgive us, but we made some changes,” said Peter. “Cut some connections. You’re no longer exactly Sandra Philo. You’re now what Sandra would be like if she were a disembodied spirit.”

“A soul, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Which is all that’s left of the real me now, anyway,” said the voice. A pause. “Why the change?”

“One: to prevent you from becoming what the control version of me became. And two: you’ll find very soon that you can build much more complex thoughts, and sustain them longer, than you could when you were alive. Your intelligence will rise. You should have no trouble outwitting the unmodified version of me.”

“Are you ready?” asked Sarkar.

“Yes.”

“Can you sense your surroundings?”

“Vaguely. I’m — I’m in an empty room.”

“You are in an isolated memory bank,” said Sarkar. He leaned forward, tapped some keys. “And now you have access to the net.”

“It’s — it’s like a doorway. Yes, I can see it.”

“There’s a passive, unactivated version of the Control sim online here,” said Peter. “You can scan it in as much depth as you like, learn everything there is to know about your opponent — and about me. And then, when you’re ready, you can head out into the net. After that, all you have to do is find him. Find him, and find some way to stop him.”

“I will,” said Sandra, firmly.

CHAPTER 46

Lying on the couch in his living room, Peter thought about everything. Immortality.

Life after death.

Hobson’s choice.

It was after midnight. He flipped channels. An infomercial. Ironside. CNN. Another infomercial. A colorized version of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Stock prices. The TV screen was the only source of light in the room. It strobed, a broadcast lightning storm.

He thought about Ambrotos, the immortal sim. All that time, to do whatever he wanted to do. A thousand years, or a hundred thousand.

Immortality. God, they could do the damnedest things these days.

Get over it, Ambrotos had said. Just a tiny bump in the never-ending road of life.

Peter continued to tap the channel changer.

Cathy’s affair had had such an impact on him.

He’d cried for the first time in a quarter of a century.

But the immortal sim had called it no big deal.

Peter exhaled noisily.

He loved his wife.

And he’d been hurt by her.

The pain had been … had been exquisite.

Ambrotos no longer felt it so intensely.

To go through eternity unfazed seemed wrong.

To not be destroyed by something like this … seemed, somehow, like being less alive.

Quality, not quantity.

Hans Larsen had had it all wrong. Of course.

Peter stopped flipping channels. There, on the CBC French service, a naked woman.

He admired her.

Would an immortal man stop to admire a pretty woman? Would he really enjoy a great meal? Would he feel the pain of love betrayed, or the joy of it rekindled? Perhaps yes, but not as intensely, not as sharply, not as vividly.

Just one event out of an endless stream.

Peter turned off the TV.

Cathy had told him she wasn’t interested in immortality, and Peter had come to realize that he wasn’t, either. After all, there was something more than this life, something beyond, something mysterious.

And he wanted to find out what it was — eventually, of course.

Peter had defined it all. The beginning of life. The end of life.

And, for himself at least, he had defined what it meant to be human.

His choice was made.

Alexandria Philo’s mind traveled the net. The Peter Hobson Control simulacrum was huge — gigabytes of data. No matter how clandestinely one tried to move that much information, it could always be detected. She’d managed to follow him down into the States, through the Internet gateway into military computers, back out into the international financial net, up into Canada again, and across the ocean to England, then France, then Germany.

And now the murdering sim was inside the massive mainframes of the Bundespost.

Sandra hadn’t followed it there directly, though. Instead, she’d gone to the German hydroelectric commission, where she left a little program inside the master computer that would crash the system at a predetermined time, shutting off all power in the city.

As usual, the hydroelectric commission had backed up everything late the night before — and Sandra had allowed herself to be included in that backup. The current version of herself would be lost when the RAM she was in was wiped during the forced blackout. Her only regret was that once she was restored she’d have no memories of this great triumph. But someday there might be other electronic criminals to bring to justice — and she wanted to be ready.

Sandra transferred herself into the Bundespost central mainframe, a time-consuming task given the bandwidth of telephone cable. She executed a surreptitious directory listing. The Control sim was still there.

It was time. Sandra felt the shutting down of external ports as the power went off across Hanover. The Bundespost UPS kicked in silently, before any active memory could degrade. But there was no way out now. She sent a message out into the mainframe. “Peter Hobson?”

The Control sim signaled back. “Who’s there?”

“Detective Inspector Alexandria Philo, Metropolitan Toronto Police.”

“Oh, God,” signaled Control.

“Not God,” said Sandra. “Not a higher arbiter.

“What I did was justice,” said Control.

“What you did was vengeance.”

“ ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’ Since there’s no God for me, I thought I’d fill in the gap.” A pause, measured in nanoseconds. “You know I’m going to escape,” said Control. “You know — oh. Clever.”

“Good-bye,” said Sandra.

“A contraction of ‘God be with ye.’ Inappropriate. Besides, don’t I deserve a trial?”

The UPS batteries were running out. Sandra sent a final message. “Think of me,” she said, “as a circuit-court judge.”

She felt the data around her zeroing out, felt the system degrading, felt it all coming to an end for both this version of herself and, at last, for the fugitive Peter Hobson.

Justice had been done, she thought. Justice had—

They sat side by side on the couch in their living room, a small distance between them. Most of the lights were off. The television showed the crowd in Nathan Phillips Square out front of Toronto City Hall, gathered to celebrate the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. A picture-in-a-picture box in the upper right showed Times Square in New York; there was something about that dropping American ball that was a universal part of celebrating this event. In the upper-left corner of the TV screen the word MUTE glowed.

Cathy looked at the screen, her beautiful, intelligent face composed in reflective lines. “It was the best of times,” she said softly. “It was the worst of times.”