After the advent of sophisticated VE, nobody waking up in a strange environment could ever be completelysure whether or not it was real. And no matter how many times a man might wake thereafter, or to what kind of environment, he remained in the depths of the maze of uncertainty, knowing that he could never be sure of his escape.

It wasn’t quite that bad in practice — not, at least, in my young days. In my young days, every discriminating person thought he or she could tell the difference between meatspace and the cleverest imaginable VE. Even in those days, though, you’d have had to be a complete fool not to see which way the world was going, and know that it wouldn’t always be that easy.

Maybe it would have been easy enough if the manufactured illusions had always had to rely on human programmers, but anyone who’d thought long and hard about it even in my day would probably have realized that there was another important threshold yet to be crossed.

If ever the machines that were manufacturing the illusions became independently smart, cutting human programmers out of the loop, there would be a whole new ballgame. And which AIs, out of the billions manufactured for human use, were the most likely to make the jump to self-consciousness and self-direction? Fancy spaceships? Humaniform robots? Communication systems? Or VE feeders? Or all of the above? Who could tell?

Not, apparently, the posthumans who lived alongside the first few generations of ultrasmart machines.

So how could anyone know for sure, when he woke up to a morning of a day some little way advanced from my own youth, that he hadn’t been taken away in his sleep and frozen down, not to be woken up again until the world had gone all the wayin the direction that it had already been going when he went to sleep? Even if he actually rememberedbeing frozen down — or thought he did — where else could he possibly be but in the maze of uncertainty, incapable any longer of making any final decision as to what might be real and what might be fairy tale?

One thing of which a man of my day could be certain, however, was that if he remembered — or thought he remembered — two mutually contradictory accounts of an event, then at least one of them must be a damn lie. Statistically speaking, the probability that either of them was true was no more than a quarter. And even if one could not actually “remember” two mutually contradictory accounts, the possibility that one might at some stage in the future “remember” another — and perhaps another and another and another — implied that the probability that anything one perceived after any such awakening was true had to be reckoned less than a half.

Unlike the philosophers of old, therefore, the wise man of the post-VE era would bet on the falsehood every time.

Once a man of my time had fallen asleep, even if he were convinced that he had only fallen asleep for a single night, he could not help waking up in a fairy-tale world where everything was more likely to be false than to be true, more likely to be a tale than a biography, more likely to be a fantasy than a reality, more likely to be part of a lostory than part of a history.

All in all, therefore, I was not much worse off when I awoke on Excelsior, or inside Charity, than anyone in my situation would have been. Yes, I was living in a bizarre fairy tale — but as the calculus of probability would have informed me that I was living in a fairy tale anyway, why should I be unduly perturbed by its bizarrerie? Should I not have been grateful? After all, if we are condemned by logic to live our lives as if they were stories, do we not have every reason to hope that the stories will make full use of our imagination? Would we not be within our rights to feel short-changed by fate if the stories in which we found ourselves were as dull and as relentlessly ordinary as the lives we had lived before we fell asleep?

Perhaps we should also hope that the stories in which we find ourselves will have happy endings — but I’m not so sure of that. Even mortals, once they enter into fairy tales, may hope to become emortal — and what is emortality but a qualified immunity from endings of all kinds?

On due reflection — and I speak as one who has been through the looking glass and back again more than once — I think that people of my time, and maybe imaginative people of every time, should not go into fairy tales looking for endings at all, but should instead be content with the traveling, at least for as long as the traveling takes them to places that they could hardly have imagined before.

I think I would have come to that conclusion much earlier if my head hadn’t hurt so much when my memories first became confused, and I feel that I should have arrived at it more rapidly once my head stopped hurting, had I not been so distracted — but for what it may be worth, I give it to you now, in the hope that it might add a little extra spice to the rest of my story.

Thirty-Six

In the Forest of Confusion

When I woke up again, the first thing that hit me was the odor. I had faded out in the midst of the most appalling stink imaginable, but I came back into being buoyed up by lovely perfume.

The sense of smell is said to be the most primitive in our armory; it usually bothers us very little, but when it does its appeals are urgent and irresistible. I had talked to my old friend Damon Hart while I was trembling on the brink of Hell, the odor of my own decay dueting with crude pain; all I needed to be delivered to the doorstep of Heaven was the absence of a headache and the symphony of scents comprising a forest in spring. Logic suggests that human beings ought to prefer the odors of a savannah and a cooking fire — but there is much in us that is older than the human, let alone the posthuman, and there is something in forests for which nostalgia is written in the fleshy tables of the human heart.

My host understood humans well enough to know that. That was why I woke into a forest. It was a virtual forest — I never had the slightest doubt about that — but it was an environment in which I felt perfectly at home. It was Arcadia, Eden, and the Earthly Paradise.

I opened my eyes, already knowing that I was going to see trees, and that I was going to find the sight delightful. I did.

That would have been the whole truth, instead of merely the truth, if it hadn’t been for the snake. The patches of sky that I could see through the magnificent crowns of foliage were a benign blue. The grass in which I lay supine was soft, its silky seed heads bowing tokenistically before a slight breeze. The combination of scents was redolent with impressions of health and reassurance. But…

The snake was dangling from a supple bough of a bush that sprouted beside me. It was not a big snake — no longer than my forearm, and no thicker than my thumb — nor was it decked out in warning coloration, being mostly green with streaks of brown; nor was it displaying its fangs in a threatening manner. It was, however, unmistakably a snake.

If there is code written into human meatware that responds to the scents of a forest, there is also a code that commands us to be wary of snakes, even when we know that we are characters in a fairy tale — perhaps, given the nature of human folklore, especiallywhen we know that we are characters in a fairy tale.

I was in no hurry to move. Breathing was luxury enough, and I could breathe perfectly well without moving. I knew that my body, wherever it was held, must be breathing too, so breathing seemed to be a trustworthy reality: a connection with the truth that lay beyond the fairy tale, temporarily unreachable.

I looked at the snake, and it looked back at me.

Having no reason to take it for granted that the snake couldn’t speak, I was tempted to say hello, but I didn’t. I would have felt ridiculous. I knew that I would have to move eventually, but I was in no hurry. I had just come from a place in which I had been imprisoned as completely as it had ever been possible for any organic entity to be imprisoned, and the mere conviction that I could move if I needed to was sufficient for the time being. I knew that it wouldn’t be actual movement, because my real body was securely pupated in a chrysalis, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.