“Oh, must I? And you’re here to persuade me, right?”

She stepped up to the surface of the Virtual wall which separated us. After a moment, I put down my drink and approached her.

She stepped out of the wall.

I could feel her warmth, the feather of her breath on my face. My heart was pounding, somewhere, in a hollow metal chest cavity.

…But even as I stared at Eve, I was figuring how much processing power this Virtual must be demanding. This creature with me wasn’t Eve, and it sure wasn’t the cosy untouchable Virtual representation my apartment used to call up. How were the Ghosts doing this?

She held out her hand. I reached out, and my fingers passed through her arm; her flesh, crumbling into cuboid pixels, had the texture of dead leaves.

“I’m sorry.” She pushed back her hair. She reached out to me again.

This time, when her fingers settled in mine, they were warm and soft; her hand was like a bird, living and responsive.

“Oh, Eve.” I couldn’t help myself.

“Jack, you must understand.”

Behind her, the wall turned black.

Eve’s hand was still warm in mine. “You must watch,” she told me, “and learn. It is a long story…”

There was a patch of light, diffuse, in the center of the wall. It resolved into the blue Earth. Ships swam around it, on sparks of light.

PART 1

ERA: Expansion

It was, I saw, the morning of mankind, two thousand years before my own birth.

“It’s difficult now to recapture the mood of those times,” Eve said. “Confidence — arrogance…”

Earth was restored. Great macroengineering projects, supplemented by the nanoengineering of the atmosphere and lithosphere and the transfer off-planet of most power-generating and industrial concerns, had stabilized and preserved the planet’s fragile ecosystem.