"Actually," Tory said, "I very rarely work as a wetsurgeon. An accident like yours is rare, you know-maybe once, twice a year. Mostly I work in wetware development. Currently I'm on the Star Maker project.''
"I've heard that name before. Just what is it anyway?"
Tory didn't answer immediately. He stared down into the lake, a cool breeze from above ruffling his curls. Elin caught her breath. / hardly know this man, she thought wildly. He pointed to the island in the center of the lake, a thin, stony finger that was originally the crater's thrust cone.
"God lives on that island," he said.
Elin laughed. "Think how different history would be if He'd only had a sense of direction!" She wanted to bite her tongue when she realized that he was not joking.
"You're being cute, Shostokovich," Landis warned. She swigged down a mouthful of wine. "Jeez, that's vile stuff."
Tory rubbed the back of his neck ruefully. "Mea culpa. Well, let me give you a little background. Most people think of wetware as being software for people. But that's too simplistic, because with machines you start out blank-with a clean slate-and with people, there's some ten million years of mental programming already crammed into their heads.
"So to date we've been working with the natural wetware.
We counterfeit surface traits-patience, alertness, creativity- and package them like so many boxes of bonemeal. But the human mind is vast and unmapped, and it's time to move into the interior, for some basic research.
"That's the Star Maker project. It's an exploration of the basic substructural programming of the mind. We've redefined the overstructure programs into an integrated system we believe will be capable of essence-programming, in one-to-one congruence with the inherent substructure of the universe.''