So, the question I woke up with every day and went to bed with every night: was I really Allison Pearl?

In the most obvious sense, no. How could I be? Allison Pearl had lived and (presumably) died on Earth ten thousand years ago, back when Earth was a habitable planet. All that remained of her were a few gigs of diary entries that had somehow survived to the present day. The diary began in Allison Pearl’s tenth year of life and ended for no apparent reason in her twenty-third. Treya had absorbed all those diary entries (and thousands of ancillary details about twenty-first-century life) both cortically and limbically, as data and as identity. Certainly Treya had never believed herself to “be” Allison Pearl. But she had carried Allison Pearl like a copybook deep in the meat of her brain. The Network had installed Allison Pearl in Treya’s psyche, and the Network had built and maintained rigorous barriers between Allison and Treya.

Rigorous, but not rigorous enough. Because here was a secret I had told no one: even before the Network went down, even before the rebel Farmers destroyed my node, Allison had been bleeding into Treya. And Treya had never objected, nor had she complained to her administrative handlers. Instead Treya had kept the steady drip of Allison Pearl into her daily life a secret—a guilty secret, because there were qualities in Allison that Treya had coveted for herself.

Treya was obedient. Allison was defiant. Treya was willing to submerge her identity in the greater identity of Vox. Allison would sooner have died. Treya believed everything she was told by duly anointed authorities. Allison distrusted all authority, on principle.

But even that distinction falls short of absolute truth. Better to say that, through Allison, Treya had begun to discover the possibilities of skepticism, defiance, rebellion.

So ask again. What was I, now that the door between Treya and Allison had been thrown wide open? Was I Allison, or was I Treya being Allison?

No! Neither. I was a third thing.

I was what I had made of myself from all these incompatible parts, and I was entitled to all my memories, real and virtual. Vox had cultivated both Treya and Allison, but Vox hadn’t counted on the consequences of the mixture. And fuck Vox, anyway! There it was, the heresy Treya had always resisted and for which the voice of Allison had silently begged: Fuck Vox, fuck its quiet tyranny, fuck its frozen dream religion, and fuck its craven obsession with the Hypotheticals.

Fuck especially the madness that had brought Vox to this ruined Earth, and fuck the more profound madness I believed was about to break loose aboard her.

Fuck Vox! And bless Allison Pearl for making it possible to say so.

*   *   *