Flux

    "Is the machine an extension of me, or have I grown a reflection of the machine...?" The words thrummed past the lips of the avatar hanging over the enormous double doors that crowned the antechamber, as though his musings had strummed real live vocal chords rather than the pixels stretching, taut and stagnant between him and the woman across the carpet.
    She offered the freckled Cheshire's floating head and manacled hands naught more than a weak smile. "Much as I have cherished your moral support, this is no time to be trite." She, too, was an avatar-- everything there was but a careful stream of zeroes and ones-- but she was a simulacrum rather than a fiction.
    The avatar in manacles smirked at her. She looked nothing like a woman trying to save mankind from itself (or, its toys, at the very least), nothing like the rogue neuroscientist with clinical depression taking on the world, nothing like he would have expected the woman of his dreams to at all. She had skin the color of black coffee, and wide-set eyes every bit as dark and edgy. These, coupled with a long, horse-like face and close-cropped hair gave her a morose air. To call her pear-shaped would be generous.
    Her name was Era.
    "You'll have to excuse me for trying to lighten the mood," he shrugged insofar as he could without shoulders. "Surely you're anxious?"
    Her hands were clasped around her knee, and despite the fact she had her legs crossed she couldn't help bouncing them in agitation. "Yes. But I've always done better under pressure."
    "Stirs the spirit from its torpor, eh?”
    She didn't reply. He would blame the sciences for taking all the poetry out of her, but his own profession was guiltier by far of that transgression...
    "Thank you for helping me, all this time," Era replied instead.
    "It was nothing," he returned easily. "Encrypting the output from your C.F.A.S. interface was easy; we've come a long way from the Elliptic Curve Cryptography the NSA cracked back when America was still the United States. I'd hate to be the one trying to crack my codes, though..." He realized quickly that he'd lost his audience. "But... why speak as though you aren't coming back? It's only a hearing. You haven't vandalized their precious Cognitive Flux Assimilation System, only scared away a user or two."
    She hesitated, then bared him a sideways, sardonic grin. "Mind if I indulge in a soliloquy?"
    "A play on my eloquence and trust that I will spread your famous last words?" he returned, drifting before her field of vision.      "I'd be a charlatan to refuse." His hands folded themselves behind his head, the chain between his cuffs swaying grimly-- juxtaposed to his beaming visage.
    "You always seem so calm, as though you've peered into the future..."
    "Once a philosopher said that men of science weren’t divinators, but gamblers with better knowledge of the odds than the best of hands at poker."
    "Care to tell me my odds?"
    "Care to examine my brain for me?"
    She laughed a little, in spite of herself, and the noise of it flooded the cold chamber, brought life to the felicitous pastels and holographic pamphlets too well-crafted to welcome the avatars like they should. He basked in that rare, genuine smile. It was fleeting, crushed by her confession when at last it came.
    "It's not that I won't be coming back. It's just that I'm not sure I'll be worth mentioning after. I wish I was in a simulation, a film or a story or a game. There scientists are... powerful. One man works tirelessly and finds a cure. Another invents a fantastic AI that revolutionizes labour. But that's not how it is. The C.F.A.S. took a team of thousands just to design. Every discovery ever penned was written in leaps and bounds over the course of a century before someone tied it together and basked in its glory. I-- can't help but feel crushed in the face of that. I've been heckling the Enforcers that run this system for years, but my data and my theories are weak, and I couldn't dream of believing in them myself until I had a few colleagues confirm my findings."
    She shook her head as her companion made to interrupt. "Yes, I've been fighting to have my research funded, but the conviction driving that was no better founded than the shouts of any common protestor. I should have lain lower until I had more support for my theory. Now I'm going to go to that panel of C.F.A.S. executives and preach Hebbian Neural Computerization, a notion which would spell horrors for their business, and I have little more than synthetic hot air to blow at them."
    "You're unusually talkative today, Era..."
    "..."
    He relented. "Do you take me for a fool?" He asked, suddenly.
    "Usually."
    "Ach, the tables turn. Gallows humour for both of us, then. But really."
    "You-- might be called shrewd."
    "Consider the fact that the shrewd fool hasn't lost interest in you yet.”
    "Your self-aggrandizement is meant to make me feel better?"
    "No. The fact that you have managed to obtain statistically significant results showing a decreased affect, decreased function of the somatosensory cortices and ventromedial sector of the brain, and decreased decision-making ability in C.F.A.S users--that should make you feel better. And what you propose isn't crazy-- it's only what no one wants to hear. It's been obvious for years that a mind cannot exist independently of a body. You merely add that it can't divorce itself from its sensorium too long, either."
    "Even assuming that my results aren't flukes, I have no proof that those effects are detrimental to the kind of lives humans do and will be living in the future, though," she added, quietly. "It's all very... value-laden."
    She was staring at the floor, so she didn't catch the venomous glitch that distorted her companion's avatar while he spoke, in a voice little too cheerful: "Yes. I suppose one never did need much higher order cognitive capacity to go out and operate farm or electrical equipment. So what does the manner of one's boundless nightlife matter? Why not plug in?" He grunted. "You don't seem nearly as enthusiastic about this as you were when we chased the Enforcers off your server during that protest last election season."
    "I'm giving a speech any minute now. I need to empathize with my audience."
    "Hmph. What you need to do is scare them shitless, all those old rationalists fleeing from their infirmities in their self-vindicating brain-child. Forcing the rest of us to--."
    Era glanced up, alarmed. "You sound as though you've met them."
    He smiled breezily back. "I don't know what you mean. I've simply done my reading on your opponents. Haven't you?"
    Her brow furrowed. "Nothing but a programmer living off his mother's roof garden, hmm?"
    "Speaking of shrewd fools-- ah, but that's for you," her companion chirped, clapping his hands together and rattling the chains between them. "Best be punctual."
    She didn't move a muscle, save to scowl at him. "At least tell me your name, before I go."
    But he was vanishing-- all but his grin. "Perhaps. If you win in there."
    "But that's imposs--."
    The wide doors swung open to admit her.
    Her mysterious companion was gone.