They sat, and there was an odd glint in Snow’s eyes as they faced her again. Was it amusement, Rebel wondered?

If so, it was buried deep, Heisen cleared his throat and said, “This is Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark. Two days ago she was a persona bum, name of Eucrasia Walsh. Eucrasia was doing prelim on a string of optioned wetsets when she burned on the Mudlark wafer and popped her base.

Wound up in Our Lady of Roses, and—”

“Hold it right there, chucko!” Rebel said angrily. “Reel it back and give it to me without the gobbledegook.”

Heisen glanced at Snow and she nodded slightly. He began again, this time directing his speech at Rebel.

“Deutsche Nakasone reviews a lot of wetware every day.

Most of it is never used, but it all has to be evaluated. They hire persona bums to do the first screening. Not much to it. They wire you up, suppress your base personality—that’s Eucrasia—program in a new persona, test it, deprogram it, then program you back to your base self. And start all over again. Sound familiar?”

“I… think I remember now,” Rebel said. Then, urgently,

“But it doesn’t feel like anything I’ve done. It’s like it all happened to somebody else.”

“I’m coming to that,” Heisen said. “The thing is that persona bums are all notoriously unstable. They’re all suicidally unhappy types—that’s how they end up with that kind of job, you see? They’re looking to be Mister Right.

But the joke is that they have such miserable experience structures they’re never happy as anyone. Experience always dominates, as we say.” He paused a beat and looked triumphantly at Snow. “Only this time it didn’t.”

Snow said nothing. After an uncomfortable pause, Heisen said, “Yeah. We’ve got the exception that disproves the rule. Our Eucrasia powered on, tried the persona—and she liked it. She liked it so much that she poured a glass of water into the programmer and shorted it out. Thus destroying not only the safe-copy of her own persona, but also the only copy in existence of the Mudlark program.”