There was a sudden, overwhelming sense of Tory's presence, and a sourceless voice said to her, "This will take a minute. Amuse yourself by calling up a few friends." Then he was gone.
Elin floated, free of body, free of sensation, almost godlike in her detachment. She idly riffled through the images, stopped at a chubby little man drawing a black line across his forehead. Hello, Hans, she thought.
He looked up and winked. "How's it hanging, kid?"
Not so bad. What're you up to?
"My job. I'm the black-box monitor this shift." He added an orange starburst to the band, surveyed the job critically in a pocket mirror. "I sit here with my finger on the button"- one hand disappeared below his terminal-"and if I get the word, I push. That sets off explosives in the condenser units and blows the dome. Pfffft. Out goes the air."
She considered it: a sudden volcano of oxygen spouting up and across the lunar plains. Human bodies thrown up from the surface, scattering, bursting under explosive decompression.
That's grotesque, Hans.
"Oh, it's safe. The button doesn't connect unless I'm wetwired into my job."
Even so.
"Just a precaution; a lot of the research that goes on here wouldn't be allowed without this kind of security. Relax-I haven't lost a dome yet."
The intercom cut out, and again Elin felt Tory's presence. "We're trying a Trojan horse program this time-inserting you into the desired mental states instead of making you the states. We've encapsulated your surface identity and routed the experimental programs through a secondary level. So with this series, rather than identifying with the programs, you'll perceive them all indirectly."