"Faster, more compact computing devices." The image crumbled for a sudden, shocking moment into a storm of cubical pixels. "Jack, this is right at the edge of what I left in my Notebooks."

"Bear with me, please... it is important. How would you do it?"

She rubbed the bridge of her nose, as if her head was aching. "Assuming you're talking about the Universe we're living in -- so the fundamental laws are the same -- you'd have to find a way of reducing Planck's constant, over some region of space. The interface between Planck-differentiated regions would be kind of interesting. But it's impossible, of course." She looked up at me, troubled. "Jack, I don't like this. It makes me feel -- odd."

"I'm sorry." Without thinking I reached for her, through the wall; but my hand passed through her arm with little resistance.

"Jack. Don't." She stepped back, out of my reach. "It only hurts you."

"I have to go away."

"What?"

"I'm to make an inspection of a Ghost experiment. They say I must be physically modified... I might not come back."

"Well, why not," she said. "Lethe, Jack, I've been dead three years. You're getting morbid." Then she raised both hands to her head and said indistinctly, "If Planck's constant were taken to the ultimate, down to zero--"

"What? Eve, tell me."

She looked at me through a hail of pixels, her eyes wide. "Space could shatter--"

She dissolved. The wall became a wall again.

So I was made a Ghost.

My brain and spinal cord were rolled up and moved into a cleaned-out chest cavity. My circulatory system was wrapped into a complex mass around the brain pan. The Ghosts built a new metabolic system, far more efficient than the old and capable of working off direct radiative input. New eyes, capable of working in spectral regions well beyond the human range, were bolted into my skull; and I was given Ghost "muscles" -- a tiny antigravity drive and compact actuator motors.

At last I was dipped in something like hot mercury.

The Sink Ambassador came to see me while I was being reconstructed. Its voice was like a bird hovering in the darkness. "How do you feel?"

I laughed -- or sent appropriate impulses to my translator chips, at least. "How do you think I feel?"

"They tell me your spirits are high..."

"You're reducing Planck's constant. Aren't you? But I don't understand what quagma has to do with it."

The Ghost hesitated.