Jessica had been very angry in the dream. That’s mostly what she remembered. That she was very, very angry, because she didn’t want to be buried in the ground and someone had done that to her.

Sometimes she could almost see who it was. But she couldn’t turn her head far enough to make him out. She rolled her eyes back and forth but she couldn’t see him because he kept scuttling out of sight.

Even now, recalling the dream, she was angry. It rose up in her, that anger, like boiling oil rushing through her veins.

But Anthony didn’t like her to be angry. So she wasn’t. And the boiling oil turned slow and sluggish as it cooled. It became thick, like jelly.

Jessica breathed for the first time since the memory of the dream had come to her. Her hands were kneading the back of his neck. From where she sat it looked almost as if she was choking him.

Bug Man opened his eyes and stared at the sheet beneath his face. He hadn’t meant to do that, to tell her to shut up. It made her seem like a robot. Like a machine. Any other girl would have argued, but no other girl had quite as much “wire” in her brain as Jessica.

She was in many ways his greatest accomplishment, second only to taking down Vincent and Kerouac. She was so beautiful, a tall, elegant African beauty with amazing eyes and a perfect body, and a mouth that, oh God, and even now it hurt him to think about how much he had wanted her. She was so beautiful, she could silence a whole noisy restaurant just by walking in the front door. And she was his, all his, 100 percent his.

She was amazing. When she was on his arm, she made him a king. Men looked at him with baffled respect. Women looked at him wondering just what it was about him that could command a girl like Jessica.

But Jessica didn’t really have much to say. When they watched movies together, she would wait until he had expressed an opinion and then parrot him. He could see she hadn’t really liked Tron 2 until, as the credits rolled, he’d said he loved it. And then, so had she.

When a minute later he said that the truth was it kind of sucked, she agreed.

And agreed again when he changed his mind and praised it.

That could have gone on for hours.

It was creepy. It was boring. She would say what he wanted her to say. She would do what he wanted her to do. She was, he realized sadly, like a game you’ve already mastered completely. She was Portal 2 in a Portal 3 world.

He eased her off him, stood up, and went to the window. “It’s a boring town, anyway,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much to do.”

She was about to agree with him, and the prospect made him cringe. “On the other hand, maybe we could sneak out for a little bit, right? Maybe just to my place where I work. Whatever.”

She agreed with him. It seemed sincere.

Go limp, Burnofsky had told him. Do nothing for now. So he would do nothing. But he could still watch, right?

(ARTIFACT)

Preliminary investigation of suicides and psychotic breaks. Notes of Dr Nigel Blankenthorpe, Chief Medical Officer, Doll Ship.

I have sufficient data to confirm what I have suspected: the suicide rate among wired subjects is almost six times higher on average than would be predicted by standard models. The rate of sudden psychotic break is almost as high.

There were seventeen suicides between January 1 and June 1. Given the ages, backgrounds, and mental histories of the population, no more than three suicides should have occurred.

In that same period five individuals out of the combined populations of Benjaminia and Charlestown attacked staff or fellow townsfolk with sufficient violence that injuries resulted. One death occurred.

The question that had to be answered is whether these rates are a result of the unique conditions aboard the Doll Ship—separation from family, a constrained environment, etc. Or whether these suicides and psychotic breaks are some sort of reaction to the wiring process itself.

At my request Dr Aliyah Suleiman at AFGC New York sent me additional data that confirm that what I am seeing here on the Doll Ship is

part of a pattern associated with wiring.

I have thus far performed three autopsies—two of suicides, one of a patient who became so violent staff had to resort to deadly force—and my preliminary observations suggest that in these cases the brains began a sort of counterwiring. Dense clusters of new brain cells that grew almost like cancers, or as if in mimicry of the wires, formed in the hippocampus, in the nucleus accumbens, even in the frontal cortex.

The sample size is too small to reach conclusions. But my hypothesis is that some brains grow fresh tissue spurred by the wire. In the cases observed, this new growth can predispose toward depression and thus suicide, or incoherent rage.

Fortunately this appears in only a minority of cases. Though when it is extended to the entire human race I would expect to see tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of suicides and violent psychotic outbursts.

Recommend that AFGC begin a much wider investigation of this phenomenon.

Tables and charts attached.

TEN

Word had gone throughout Benjaminia that the Great Souls were coming.

The Great Souls!

People with fixed, jawbreaking smiles and wide, glittering eyes and way too much energy wouldn’t stop talking about it.

Everyone was busy cleaning up the town. In this case it meant using buckets of a gentle acid wash to scrub the curving nickel alloy walls with long-handled brushes. The walls were already clean— cleanliness was part of sustainable happiness—so this was more an act of devotion than of simple housekeeping.

More immediately noticeable was the touch-up painting on the great pillar that rose through the center of the sphere, as well as similar work on the entrance to the tunnel that connected Benjaminia with Charlestown. The most adept artists touched up the painted sky with its wondrous image of the Great Souls reaching out a hand to God on their left and Darwin on their right.