As now. Hearing the voice, Corvallis turned his head to see El’s avatar standing a couple of meters off to his side. The avatar was also gazing at the Wad, as people had begun referring to the dense cottony underlayment of this display. El turned his head to look at Corvallis. The avatar didn’t look much like Elmo Shepherd. Whoever had designed it had apparently started with a 3-D scan of the Metatron and then tweaked it over time. It had passed through a phase of looking dangerously like the statuette on an Academy Award, and people had started calling it Oscar. But then El must have called in an artist or a designer or something, because it had taken on more human features and acquired a vague resemblance, in a shiny metallic way, to his high school yearbook photo. As avatars went, it wasn’t a good one. You could buy far more expressive avatars for next to nothing. Most people did. El’s using this one was a conscious choice on his part, presumably for the same reason he chose to use a voice generated by an algorithm: he didn’t want people to know his real condition, or indeed whether this thing was embodying a single human or a committee of handlers.

“In old TV shows,” said the voice of El, “and I mean really old, like campy sitcoms from the 1960s, sometimes they’d do a dream sequence or something in heaven. Dress the actors up in bedsheets, hang wings on them, give them harps and halos. But there was always this.” The avatar extended its hand and skated it through the Wad. “You could see that off camera there had to be buckets of water with dry ice in them, bubbling away. Covering the floor of the studio with dense white fog.”

“So it would look like they were in the clouds,” Corvallis said. “Yes, I remember seeing a few of those.”

“Reminds me of that,” said El’s avatar, drawing its hand back.

“A deliberate choice?” Corvallis asked.

“Oh, of course not!” El scoffed. Corvallis was sure, now, that he was actually talking to Elmo Shepherd. That he was alive, at least temporarily lucid, and speaking through this avatar as directly as his failing body would allow. “This visualization algorithm is what it is. The spatial organization fell out naturally—it was the best way to sort out what was going on. White was the default color—it’s used when we don’t have a clear sense of the identity or role of a given process. Which is true of almost all of them, as you can see. It’s only in the last few weeks, as things changed, that it began to remind me of 1960s-sitcom heaven.”

“What did change, Elmo? Why does it look so different now? How’s it related to what is going on in the Town Square?”

“It’s a phase transition, I think.”