When the surge of joy hit, Ambrose was once again aware of his entire body. He felt his back arch like a UniPet cat and knew that he had died and been reborn within Martin’s hardcoding. The ecstatic shimmer left behind an inner warmth, as if he’d just swallowed a pellet of tea. He was home—and his home had been vastly improved in his absence. He found himself sitting behind Martin’s desk in the Greymatter office. The perfectly calibrated chair made him feel relaxed and energetic at the same time. He leaned back and regarded Ambrose 47 in his absurd brown-and-red-striped suit and tried to see his counterpart as anything other than an insignificant collection of brightly colored data.

Ambrose 47 brushed something from his sleeve and spoke in a distant, unpleasant gurgle. “This is highly unprofessional.”

Ambrose winced. He longed to shut out his counterpart and explore Martin’s—now his—Admin Deck. Unison responded to this desire, and the Deck eclipsed his perception so that the office receded to an image on a screen within a screen, a recording of some grainy pre-Unison broadcast. Ambrose 47 shrank to a distant, squawking blur as Ambrose accessed Martin’s corporate Feed, a centralized pincushion of Unison analytics blinking like Eastern Seaboard City at night. The interface was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He wasn’t just logged back into the social network; he was the social network. Data sorted itself according to his own capacity to understand it, obeying his unspoken commands as if he were a teacher silencing an unruly class with a single glare. Impressions of potential users who hadn’t even begun to create Profiles were etched in his mind as if Unison had reached out into the fleshbound world, tapped them on the shoulder, and requested their signatures. This universe made his old Admin Deck look like a toy.

In the diminished interior of the Greymatter office, the fuzzy smear of Ambrose 47 was becoming increasingly agitated.

“… and not only that, it’s a violation of the Creator-Director’s trust!”

The voice was a mosquito whine inside Ambrose’s ear. In that netherworld of pointless distractions outside the confines of the Admin Deck, Ambrose 47 droned on and on. The Deck responded to this persistent annoyance by presenting Ambrose with an Account deletion dashboard. Ambrose queried his counterpart’s Profile. All around him the Deck quivered in anticipation. Deleting a user from a parallel reality had certainly never been done before. It would be an interesting case study: if deletion resulted in Ambrose 47’s death, at least Ambrose would have baseline data for improving safety in future Unison upgrades. His finger hovered over his counterpart’s blinking red name. It felt so natural to be in complete control, to have his decision making fully integrated with the Deck. Eliminating Ambrose 47 would be easier than swatting a fly. So why was his finger frozen in place, refusing his command?