Experience, she was saying. Pure and bone deep. What could be more true than that? What could be more true than the feelings that underwrite our very existence?

'Amor vincit omnia,' Neil said. 'Is that it, Nora? Is that your theory? Love conquers all?'

'Leave her out of this, Neil!'

He stood directly before her, lingering just far enough to her right to remain entirely unseen. 'I suppose you think that you make meaning, right?' He stepped back to his worktable, leaned over one of the vermillion-screened laptops. 'Tell me,' he said, his fingers sprinting across the keyboard, 'which "you" would that be, Nora?' He turned to beam a vicious grin that she could not see. 'This one?'

Click.

Something changed. There was a hole…

'This is what it's like,' Neil was saying. 'This is what it's like when the self is shut down.'

No, hole wasn't the right word; it assumed a subtraction from some greater sum, when it was the sum itself that no longer existed.

'So tell me, sweetheart, how can you make meaning when you're simply another output? Just like the feeling of making. Just like the feeling of love. How can the "feeling of being you" anchor anything, when it can be shut down with a flick of a switch? Hmm?'

Neil was speaking, but no one listened. There was simply this clearing, this space, a manifold of things and happenings, articulated in time, and belonging to no one.

'You like to think you have all these experiences, that you author all your actions, but the sad fact, my dear, is that you simply accompany them.'

There was this voice, humming with a familiarity so profound it terrified.

'No,' it said. 'No.'

Neil laughing. 'Strange, isn't it, Goodbook? To finally hear your voice as it truly is. A stranger, speaking with your lips.' He stood, and from within the clearing, seemed to gaze at the clearing itself, at the angle of its opening. 'You don't know how long I've wanted this… how long I've ached… for an opportunity to speak with you. The real you.'

And in the parallel weave of existences, there was a stinging that was also a knowing, an understanding that he spoke not to 'Goodbook', not to the cartoon, but to the brain behind and beneath. And it heard him.

Neil drifted back to his worktable, a kind of torpor in his movements.

Click.

Then Thomas was watching him, reeling with something deeper than dismay.

'I'm confused,' Nora was sobbing. 'I don't… I don't understand what's happening. All I know is that I love you, Tommy. That's all I know!'

Neil spoke before Thomas's speech center could generate any words. 'And you know what you feel, huh, Nora?'