The vision had all the qualities of a nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory.

*   *   *

The medical team had shown me the limbic implant before they installed it. I believe they interpreted my horror as preoperative anxiety.

The node was a flexible black disk a few centimeters wide and less than a centimeter thick. It was covered with nubs the size of pinheads from which fibers of artificial nervous tissue would grow, once the node established a suitable blood supply from the surrounding capillaries. Almost as soon as it was installed the implant would power up its link to the Network; within days its artificial nerves would have bonded to the spinal medulla and begun to infiltrate the targeted areas of my brain.

The medics asked me if I understood all this. I told them I did.

Then: the prick of an anesthetic injection, a cold swab at the back of my neck, oblivion while the surgeon wielded his knife.

*   *   *

The burning man had been a night watchman at my father’s warehouse in Houston.

He was a stranger to me. The killing was unpremeditated, and in a court of law the charge might have been reduced from murder to manslaughter. But I never went before a court.

Twice in my life I had told some version of that story to another person—once when I was drunk, once when I was sober; once to a stranger, once to a woman with whom I had fallen in love. In both cases the story I told was incomplete and partially fabricated. Even my best attempts at confession inevitably foundered on lies.

The people I had confessed to were all ten thousand years gone, but the dead man was locked in my conscience, where he had never stopped burning. And now I had given the keys to my conscience to the Coryphaeus, and I didn’t know what that might mean.

2.

The first change I noticed after the surgery wasn’t in myself but in other people, especially their faces.

I felt some of the side effects I had been warned about—transient dizziness, loss of appetite—but the symptoms weren’t severe and they passed quickly. What scared me wasn’t what I felt but what I might not be feeling … what I might have lost without knowing I had lost it. I questioned every unguarded impulse and I kept to myself for days, hardly speaking even to Allison (who in any case had begun treating me with a kind of mournful disdain, which I hoped was only theatrical). Both of us knew what had to be done; both of us knew I wasn’t yet ready to attempt it.