Once More With Footnotes

cheese. Frighten them to death, or wh a tever. Scares the hell out of some people, the thought that you can kill people that way. They act illogical. You find someone dead under an afer unit, you call in someone like me. Someone with no imagination.
     
                  You'd be amazed, the things I've seen.
     
                  You 're right.
     
                  You're clever. You've had an education.
     
                  You're saying, hey, I know what you saw. You saw the flat, right, and it was just like it was really, only maybe cleaner, and she was still alive in it, and maybe there was a kid's voice in the next ro om, the kid they never had, because, right, he'd sat there maybe five years ago maybe while she was still warm and done the reality creation job of a lifetime. And he was living in it, just sane enough to make sure he kept on living in it. An artificial re ality just like reality ought to have been.
     
                  Right. You're right. You knew it. I should've held something back, but that's not like me.
     
                  Don't ask me to describe it. Why ask me to describe it? It was his.
     
                  I told the other two and the PR man said firmly , "Well, all right. And then a valve stuck."
     
                  "Look," I said, "I'll just make a report, OK? About what I've found. I'm a wire man, I don't mess around with pipes. But I wouldn't mind asking you a question."
     
                  That got them. That got them. People like me d on't normally ask questions, apart from, "Where's the main switch?"
     
                  "Well?" said the suit.
     
                  "See," I said, "it's a funny old world. I mean, you can hide a body from people these days, it's easy. But there's a lot more to it in the real world. I mean, th ere's banks and credit companies, right? And medical checks and polls and stuff. There's this big electric shadow everyone's got. If you die — "
     
                  They were both looking at me in this funny way. Then the suit shrugged and the uniform handed me this print-out from the terminal. I read it, while the memory sink whirred and whirred and whirred ...
     
                  She visited the doctor last year.
     
                  The girl who runs the supermarket checkouts swears she sees her regularly.
     
                  She writes stories for kids. She's done three in the last five years. Quite good, apparently. Very much like the stuff she used to do before she was dead. One of them got an award.
     
                  She's still alive. Out there.
     
                  It's like I've always said. Most of the conversations you have with most people are just to r eassure one another that you're alive, so you don't need a very complex paragorithm. And Dever could do some really complex stuff.
     
                  She's been getting everywhere. She was on that flight to Norway that got blown up last year. The stewardess saw her. Of cou rse, the girl was wearing environment gear, all aircrew do, it stops them having to look at ugly passengers. Mrs. Dever still had a nice time in Oslo. Spent some money there.
     
                  She was in Florida, too. At the same time.
     
                  She's a virus. The first ever self -replicating reality virus.
     
                  She's everywhere.
     
    -
     
                  Anyway, you won't of heard about it, because it all got hushed up because Seagem are bigger than you thought. They buried him and what was left of her. In a way.
     
                  I heard from, you know, contacts that a t one point the police were considering calling it murder, but what was the point? The way they saw it, all the evidence of her still being alive was just something he'd arranged, sort of to cover things up. I don't think so because I like happy endings, m e.
     
                  And it really went on for a long time, the memory sink. Like I said, the flat had more data lines running into it than usual, because he needed them for his work.
     
                  I reckon he's gone out there, now.
     
                  You walk down the street, you've got your reality visor on, who knows if who you're seeing is really there? I mean, maybe it