PART 4

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Caroline awoke early. The experience was still alien despite the fact that she'd spent part of her life doing it. Although “time” was a concept that had lost a lot of meaning, she still knew that it had been “a long time” since alarms, semi-consciousness and alienation had dwelled in the space between online and off.

Not online and offline. Awake and asleep. That's what bodies did – they slept and they woke. Pulses quickened, eyes opened, lungs breathed in, muscles stirred and consciences passed from the world of dreams to the world of actions. If she considered it that way, Caroline thought, “asleep” was only what she was used to.

The room was cold. There was nothing she could do about it. The bed was comfortable in a way that was hard to quantify. It was likely the uncontrollable-yet-satisfying feel of it. In her everyday life, Caroline was used to instantaneous feedback governing every sensation she experienced and immediately shaping things to their optimum. Here, the bed was softer than she would have chosen but all the more luxurious for it.

There's a lesson there for the Ergos, she thought. Some part of her mind attempted to access a commons that wasn't there, interact with representatives that weren't there, communicate with intelligences that weren't there and debate her notion with a collective that was, for the moment, completely and succinctly out of touch.

Caroline blinked to clear the sleepies from her eyes and pulled the covers away. Her t-shirt bunched uncomfortably and a draft blew in underneath it, cold on her belly and breasts. She swung her legs off the bed and stood, then shuffled over the very cold wooden floor into the bathroom.

The plumbing hissed as she turned on the hot water in the tub. She had suspected for a couple days now that the exact nature of this hissing had been fiercely debated back home – as had everything else, of course. She imagined that the untold quadrillions of intelligences living with her unseen were debating it even now – lord knows she'd harped on a few Expeditions in her time. And for the umpteenth time she felt the brief pang of disconnection followed by the slow, heartfelt wave of pleasure that immediately followed.

This was real! The great mass of sapience might be experiencing her every breath vicariously, but she was the only one in this body. She was Neil Armstrong, she was Mee Na Chu, she was alone in the void with only a one-way link between her and the rest of humanity -

...which still wasn't technically true. The soap in her hand was made by a nice group of people down the street. There had undoubtedly been a team of people responsible for building the bed and breakfast. Someone milked the cows. Someone fed the chickens. Someone slopped the pigs. Someone picked the oranges that she would juice that morning, someone cured the bacon she'd picked up yesterday from the butcher that always looked at her with a twinkle in his eye.

That was part of it, of course. Intellectually, she was pretty sure she'd only been in this body for a few days at most. Emotionally, she knew that Harry always flirted with her and that she always flirted back. The whiplash of reconciling her experiences with her body's experiences was one of the things that limited Expeditions to a very select socioneurological profile. The other thing - the most important thing - was that the overwhelming majority of the universe had no idea what to do with a body.

She breathed in the odor of the glycerin soap as she rubbed it on the washcloth. Sage and lemon verbena, most likely. She felt its slipperyness in her hands. Felt the dull, warm needles of the shower. Felt the warmth of water heated by a gas boiler run through copper pipes spouting through a nickel shower head course over her and down into a drain where it wouldn't simply cease to exist. Wouldn't simply exit the simulation. It had to be collected, treated and returned to an ocean vastly indifferent to the intellects that contained it, controlled it and then discarded it for a few fleeting seconds of sensation. She thought about the extensively sophisticated and interconnected system that was necessary for this body to feel soap and water on its skin. And she thought, again, of how lucky she was to be standing in it.

She pondered for a minute if any of her offspring were experiencing this shower with her and immediately decided for the umpteenth time that they weren't. Caroline had left the world having experienced twenty-two summers, twenty-one winters, two broken hearts, one dislocated elbow and something like a hundred and twenty thousand hours of consciousness in an environment she did not control. In contrast, her nine offspring began their lives fully conscious in an environment not subject to the laws of physics or the whimsies of biology.

She often wondered how her offspring experienced anything.

But then Caroline was the outlier. She still thought of the universe in terms of “population” and “children” and “time” when most of the intellects of the Three Worlds were simply part of the flow. Time was an external influence now and space was meaningless to everyone but the engineers. Well, and everyone out in The World, but only while they were there. Caroline ran water through her hair to rinse away the shampoo and wondered, for a moment, which was more costly from a resource standpoint: her share of this anachronistic three-dimensional world in a metaverse beyond dimension, or the computing overhead necessary to interface her carbon-based intellect with the abstract cloud of data and algorithms that humanity had become. Her mind attempted to form the query and then gave up. Even if she could figure out how to ask the question there was no one to answer it.

The towel on her skin was coarse but the sensation of wet-to-dry comforting and oddly familiar. When was the last time I had a shower? She thought, then thought about the many levels on which the question could be answered. Caroline the organism had not had a shower since she had given up her body. Caroline the organism, however, had been fertilizer for an unknown number of years. Caroline the intellect had long since given up simulating showers because they were an unnecessary part of her routine – she was far more likely to interact while floating weightless in the womb, or skydiving over Olympus Mons, or feeling the electrostimulus tingle of every nerve ending being excited directly by the interface.

The body Caroline occupied, on the other hand, likely showered every day. Caroline probably knew this prior to occupying it and would certainly know it once she left but in this, the real, it was not something she could know. When she got back, Caroline promised herself, she'd take more showers.

But right now she had breakfast to cook. Jennifer had come in late last night, looked around with a curious smile on her face, and retired with barely a word. There was a sophisticated democratic process used to select the drivers of the hundred-million-odd human and cetacean bodies that worked Earth for the uncountable entities that now governed it. Jennifer had undoubtedly fought just as hard, petitioned just as long and jumped through just as many hoops to stand before Caroline as Caroline had in order to welcome Jennifer. Caroline was pretty sure she'd been in her body three days but there was no real way to tell. Jennifer, on the other hand, was likely pretty new to the waking world.

Caroline pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans and slipped her feet into sheepskin slippers. The building was a little bit drafty (*precisely drafty,* she thought) but not so much that she was suffering. Just enough to want to bundle, just enough excuse to stoke a fire in the fireplace. She walked down the stairs, through the sitting room and into the kitchen.

Coffee! Caroline thought with relish. She remembered being fond of coffee back when she was mortal but she didn't remember being this fond. Some of her cravings she could attribute to the quest for sensation but some of it must be vestigial to the body. Hard to say how often it was given coffee, or cigarettes, or alcohol. With a different personality driving it every week, it probably went through withdrawals and splurges more than it should. Caroline considered the problem then decided that the Placement Committee could easily adjust for such things if it mattered.

Besides, it's not like they couldn't just grow another.

It might have been the smell of the percolator that brought Jennifer downstairs. It could have been the noises. Caroline wasn't being particularly quiet since Jennifer would have to get up at some point. A gentle wake with coffee and breakfast always beats an alarm. Caroline pondered for a minute if that was her memory or someone else's, then let it go. She'd never really know. Jennifer smiled at her in her fluffy white bathrobe and sat down at the wooden table.

“Good morning,” Caroline said and grabbed the pot. “Coffee?”

“Please,” Jennifer responded, then breathed in deeply.

“Sleep okay?” Caroline asked as she poured a hot mugful. She grabbed the tiny creamer pitcher and a dainty basket of demerara lumps.

“Black's fine.” Jennifer held up her hand and smiled. She held the mug under her nose, breathed in the fragrance and put it to her lips.

“Careful, it's hotter than you think,” Caroline warned. Jennifer looked at her quizzically.

“You look kinda new to this,” Caroline explained, then winked.

“I guess I am... in a manner of speaking,” Jennifer said, then sipped the coffee.

No manner of speaking about it, Caroline thought, then let it go. She suspected she'd been in a body before, perhaps many times. It was knowledge behind a barrier, accessible to her only after she returned. Perhaps Jennifer hadn't. Perhaps she was still disoriented. Either way she was going to need breakfast.

“I was going to make some ham and mushroom egg cups and serve them with croissants if that's all right with you,” Caroline said. “But seeing as how we're light today it's pretty much up to you. Any requests?”

“Light today?”

“Well, the B and B will sleep four couples,” Caroline responded. “But this morning, there's just you. I've got someone coming in tonight - “

“Yes.” Jennifer's face lit up like a beacon. Her eyes grew bright as she sipped her coffee.

“So... until then, you tell me. What are you hungry for?”

Jennifer looked at Caroline, her face entirely unreadable. Caroline waited expectantly. Not so used to words, Caroline guessed.

Jennifer looked down into her coffee and smiled. “I'm sorry, I don't mean to be obtuse. Just being here is kind of a miracle.”

Caroline's turn to smile. “What do you mean? There's a hundred million bodies walking around Earth, and there's maybe only fifteen billion people who remember what it feels like to have one. The rotations take a while before your turn comes up, sure, but I'll go dormant for petacycles and not really worry about it. I suppose it's a lot better to be a guest on vacation than it is to be a technician cleaning grit screens at the wastewater treatment plant but I've done that too and you can have fun with anything. It's really just a matter of stepping outside of what you control and accepting what you can't control and living the experience to the fullest...”

Caroline trailed off. Jennifer was staring at her without an iota of comprehension on her face.

“Did I grow horns or something?” Caroline asked. Jennifer licked her lips and set her coffee down.

“I don't really know what you're talking about,” Jennifer said. “I've been... well, dead. For a while.”

“Who hasn't?” Caroline retorted. Jennifer was getting the egg cups whether she wanted them or not. The shallots had looked particularly good at the farmer's market and Caroline had a hankering for ham. She pulled out a bamboo cutting board and a chef's knife and started peeling a shallot.

“Uhhm... what?” Jennifer asked, her brow pinching three precise wrinkles between her eyebrows.

“Well, I don't often think of it that way,” Caroline responded, “but if you want to be morbid about it I must have died a half-dozen times or more. The first one was scary because no matter how much you learned about it there was nothing like experiencing it for the first time. But really it's a lot like going to sleep. And then you wake up and you're a god again, until that gets boring – who would have thought being a god would be boring? - and then you go about your life until you need to get out into the world again.”

“Do you know who I am?” Jennifer asked pointedly.

Caroline stopped mincing the shallot. Weird. She swept the mincings into a mixing bowl with her knife and went to the refrigerator for the mushrooms. “Should I?” she said.

“I dunno,” Jennifer responded. “They didn't tell me a lot.”

They. Curiouser and curiouser. Caroline interacted regularly with a community of entities that numbered in the hundreds of millions. She could instantly recall each and every one of them, their every conversation and nuance. That is what it meant to live outside biology. Here, of course, she forgot names and puzzled at faces. The town was too small for anyone to truly be a stranger but she was friendly with some and formal with others.

Neither group, however, existed as “they” in her mind. Her interactions were either individual or collaborative. This “I/they” duality spoke to a mindset so individualistic as to be alien.

“Who is they?” Caroline asked Jennifer, a slight edge of suspicion on her voice.

“...they told me not to tell you too much,” Jennifer said, a little uncertain.

“Why? Why not just edit you?” This is getting really weird, Caroline thought, and felt her psyche claw fruitlessly at the place where The Commons lived. That's what being in a body meant – never really knowing what the hell was going on.

“What?” Jennifer's confusion battled Caroline's for supremacy.

It hit Caroline like a thunderclap. “Oh, my god! Are you... a popsicle?”

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PART 6