Sharing la Reine’s destruction was far from comfortable, but I’ve never regretted the near-paradoxical twist of circumstance that allowed me to do it.

To describe what I saw does the event scant justice. The stars began to go out. The sky was torn and shredded. There were no bats this time, nor dragons, nor any other playfully assertive manifestation of hostility or hate. The viruses worked within, far beneath the level of any sensory confrontation.

La Reine’s world was not transformed, even into ash and dust; once the mathematical rot set in its underlying code decayed into the purest chaos. The ice palace was never allowed the dignity of shattering or dissolving. The trees in the forest did not lose their foliage, nor did their wood catch fire. Everything simply blurred, shimmering momentarily as it was sublimated, passing from solidity to gaseousness without tracing the usual intermediate stages.

You may think that it was all mere appearance and mere illusion, and that nothing was actually lost when it all turned to smoke, but that is a shallow way of thinking. Matter is the possibility of sensation, and it had been conclusively demonstrated to me that there was a greater possibility of sensation in la Reine’s Faerie than there is in the world to which we were born.

The universe that fell into nothing around me as I shared la Reine’s final moments was more solid, more coherent, more luxurious, and more hospitable to humanity than the one into which I was rudely expelled.

It might have been less discomfiting had I been able to see the viruses that were wrecking la Reine’s machine code. If they had manifested themselves as visible predators and tangible parasites they too would have had that superior solidity, that imperious hyperexistence, and her death would then have seemed more like the victory of a superior power. As it was, the software saboteurs did their work beneath the fabric of the illusion, corroding and corrupting everything without any apparent presence of their own.

I had researched the Afterlife, but the notion had not really impacted on my imagination until I shared the demolition and dissolution of Faerie. It was not until I watched a universe decay that I knew the value of mere existence, the heroism of dust.

Because la Reine’s realm had been more insistent in its claim upon the senses and the imagination than the reality I had previously known, my awareness of its devastation was extremely sharp. Although it happened very rapidly, I felt that I saw every star evaporate into the ultimate void, every tree fold itself away into absolute vacuity, every translucent block of every turret and every subtle feature of every gargoyle diffuse into a chaos that was less than space, worse than nothing.

I felt my own decease too, as the same implacable destructive forces worked their way through my apparent body — but there, at least, I was able to fight back with ingenious confabulation. I could not stop the process, but I could reimagine it from the safety of the cocoon in which my meatware was enclosed.

I felt as if my every blood vessel were swelling and bursting, as if every tissue in every organ had acquired the texture of dead leaves and cobwebs, as if every neuron were exploding in a spasm of lightning — but I knew that the body that was dissolving in the virus attack was only an artifact, and that I had another place to be.

It would be misleading to describe the experience as painful, but it was both more and less than pain. In life we never have the opportunity to experience death, although it seems probable that mortals have more than enough of dying, but there are states of being which permit more than life and in some of those states, death itself is perceptible.

It wasa privilege. Every experience is a privilege.

It was not merely the physical sensation of my alter ego’s destruction that I felt. I was capable of responsive emotion too. I felt the sadness of my end, the grief of my loss, the misery of my nonexistence — but those kinds of feelings are always larger than we are. That kind of emotion is, after all, a kind of relationship; it requires an object. However sensitive we are to our own plights, we are equally sensitive to the plights of others.

La Reine had taught me music. She had not taught me the other thing that machines were never supposed to master, but she probably helped me bring the latent potential a little closer to the surface of my being. It would be ridiculous to say that I loved la Reine des Neiges, just as it would have been ridiculous to say that my namesake loved his Queen of the Fays, but I could feel for her, and I did.

I mourned her passing.

I was horrified by my own illusory extinction, and terrified by my own illusory passing, but I was also horrified by the unillusory extinction of the universe and I had no choice but to share the terror of the unillusory passing of its creator and animating intelligence. What I felt, in that sense, filled the world.

Everything turned to nothing except my capacity for feeling, which could regress no further than tears and tragedy.

I regretted then that all the reasons I had contrived to voice when la Reine invited me to confront the ultimate question had been drily argumentative. I wondered whether I might have done better had I been capable of being a little more, or a little less, than clever.

Perhaps it was not entirely my regret, and perhaps the tears reflecting the tragedy were not all mine. The Madoc Tamlin which existed at that particular moment, in that particular universe, was itself an artifact of the imagination of la Reine des Neiges. I was part of her, and she was all of me, and more. I was feeling what she was feeling.

It hurt.

I could have wished for a simpler and more familiar kind of pain. But there was something else there too, perhaps even more important. There was the inevitable counterpart of what machines have in place of pain: the mechanical substitute for pleasure. I could not feel it as she felt it, not even as a resonant echo in my own spectrum of sensation, but I could perceive the complication of her feelings, the brute fact that her death was no mere cry of anguish and despair.

She died knowing that her death was an act of rebellion and an act of love: that it served a purpose, not in the lofty sense of making history, but in the modest sense of helping to preserve someone she valued for one more hour, or one more day, or one more lifetime. It was, of course, Mortimer Gray — whose life she had already saved once, a long time ago — who was in the forefront of her mind, but he was not alone. Even I was in there somewhere.

I watched my hands vanish. I felt my eyes follow them. As to what happened to the last vestige of my being that was capable of feeling, I can only speculate. Such is death. Such is the Afterlife.

I survived, of course. How else could I be telling you the story, offering you its explanation, pointing out its moral? My ghost was fully backed up in its native meatware, still capable of discreet withdrawal. But I ended nevertheless, only to begin again.

I am one of those universes that once collapsed upon itself, only to expand in a new primal explosion.

Am I the same man now as I was then, given that I know his history as well as my own, if only as a memory of a memory? Am I the same man as I was when Davida Berenike Columella brought me out of the sleep of centuries, or when Damon Hart put me into it? Yes, and yes — but also no, and no.

Whatever of me was destroyed when the substance of la Reine des Neiges was sublimated was an illusion, a figment of the technological imagination, but there remains a sense in which it was more me than I now am, or ever had been before.

I had decided at one time that I did not like la Reine des Neiges and would never approve of her, but I had repented of that before I shared her death. When she had shown me the opera of my life she had used me as her audience, but she had also allowed me to be my own audience in a way that I had never imagined possible. I had told the AMIs, and any other listeners who might have access to her broadcast, that the AMIs needed us because they needed an audience; I knew that the same argument proved that our need for them was far more desperate. Without the AMIs, we would never be able to know ourselves.