I looked down at myself. I was human again.

Once we’d owned an apartment at the heart of the New Bronx. It was a nice place, light and roomy, with state-of-the-art Virtual walls. Since my metamorphosis, I can’t use it anymore, but I keep it anyhow, leaving it unoccupied. Unchanged, in fact, since Eve’s death. I just like to know it’s there.

Now I was back in that apartment. I was alone.

I went to the drinks cabinet, poured myself a malt, and waited. I can still drink, of course, but I’ve discovered that much of the pleasure of liquor comes from the tactile sensations of the bottle clinking against the glass, the heavy mass of the liquor in the base of the glass, the first rush of flavor.

Being injected just isn’t the same.

I savoured my malt. It was terrific. There was more processing power behind this simulation, whatever it was, than any I’d encountered before —

One wall melted. Eve was sitting on a couch like mine. She smiled at me again.

“You have a lot of questions,” she said.

I sipped my drink. “Will you join me?”

She shook her head. She looked older than when she’d died. She pulled at a lock of hair, a habit she’d had since she was a child.

I said, “This is a Virtual simulation, right?”

“In a sense.”

“You’re not Eve. If you were, you wouldn’t even be here.” Even the Virtual copy of Eve would have cared too much to do this to me, to plunge me back into this self-regarding mess.

Despite my loneliness after the metamorphosis, I hadn’t called up Eve in seven, eight years.

“Jack, I’m a better image than any you’ve seen before. Richer. Indistinguishable from—”

“No. I can distinguish.”

She said, “You must understand what the Ghosts are doing here. And why you must allow them to proceed.”