'I told you!' she cried. 'It's the deepest, the most awesome feeling of…' She trailed into silence. Her eyes fluttered. She swallowed, then let out a long, groaning sigh. 'Ungh,' she gasped. 'You are doing something to me, aren't you? Are you touching me? Are you-you-you-yooooooo—'

'You can see it, can't you?' Neil said, glancing at Thomas. 'See her for what she is.'

No, something said. Yes.

'Mmmmm,' Nora murmured in a tone that stabbed for its familiarity. 'Ohmigawd…'

Thomas felt his voice crack. 'She's no different than us.'

'Exactly,' Neil said, grinning. 'None of us are real. Unable to see itself, our brains continually cook us up. It's just that at the moment, her brain finds itself one step lower on the causal food chain.'

He winked and added, 'Just like you.'

Neil made her weep. Neil made her scream, and he made it so that Thomas thought it funny—sublimely funny. The more ragged, the more tortured her scream, the more uproarious it became.

Then afterward, Neil laughed at his shame, and showed him every cubit of that monstrous emotion.

This time it was Nora who laughed.

Neil made her forget the minutes, then even the seconds, so that every breath she would say, 'Where am I?'

'Where am I?'

'Where am I?'

'Where am I?'

Between each game Thomas tried to soothe her, this jerking mechanism that had once been his wife. He tried to whisper reassurances that possessed no meaning in the ringing tin of his own ears.

But she could only weep, 'Ripley,' over and over again.

'Frankie.'

Neil made her come, then transformed the data signature of her voice into an algorithm that made him come. He stood between them and cackled as they cried out again and again, driven to orgasm after orgasm by the sound of the other's climax.

And Thomas did not want it to stop.

Then Neil did the same with pain, so that her wagging shrieks made him buck and howl, over and over again. A pain beyond weeping. A pain beyond succor or reprieve,

A pain only fallen angels could know.

And something began to understand.

Something… not him.

He was nothing more than an output, a kind of holographic speaker system that generated experience like sound. He had lived the abstract force of the Argument for too many years for it not to be rote, reflex. But this…

The nimbus of white ringing all points of illumination. The ache murmuring through teeth cracked for gnashing. Flexing rage. The battering love and horror. Arching lust. The glimmers of hope and beauty. And the pain, the overriding pain.

All of it falling from his best friend's fingers.

He was but a moment, something deeper than him realized. Nothing more than a fragment, fooled by blindness into thinking itself whole. Notes contemptuous of the instrument.

Music oblivious to the score.