"Even if I could describe what it's like to fuse minds, it wouldn't make sense to you," Daniels said. "It would be like describing sex to a child."

"Humor me. I have an active imagination."

Daniels rubbed one side of her nose, an old habit of hers. "It was very disorienting at first. There were vivid sensations and hallucinations, indescribable pain followed by ecstasy and everything in between. It was like the doors to my mind were blown open and everything inside was swept up and swirled together in a torrent of consciousness. But once that passed there was this calmness. I could look down on the wreckage of my own thoughts and see which pieces were twisted and broken and which had been useless from the start."

"Sounds like a mental breakdown, if you ask me."

"More like a deconstruction," Daniels said. "But that was just the beginning. From all those scattered memories and thoughts, I could start to conceive of new patterns and combinations, ways of thinking that had been there all along but I didn't have the blueprints for. I could rebuild the very mental construct I wanted to inhabit. I was thinker and observer at the same time."

"Just what was so wrong with being human that you needed to have your mind smashed into bits and put back together by an alien head-shrink?"

"You of all people should know better than to ask that. You never did tell us why you washed out of ExoCor."

"I don't have to fucking explain myself to you!" Jarvis snapped. "I'm not the one with a blood-sucking brain leech on my back."

"Blood-sucking brain symbiont," Daniels corrected.

Jarvis calmed himself. Damn, he had let her get under his skin. "Metaphors and psycho-babble, is that all you can offer?" he said. "It still looks like a brainwash job to me. How about some facts? You're an engineer, at least you used to be."

Daniels had drifted back from the wall, exposing her navel. Judging by the articulation of her ribs and abdominal muscles, she had been out of hiber for several weeks already. Her flesh had lost most of its plasticity and puffiness. "Very well. You want an engineering answer, let me tell you how I became one.

"I was in my third year of college, still undeclared and living in a mixed-sex frarority with twenty other roommates. I was stimmed out most of the time and don't remember much from those days, but there was this one Halloween party when we rented a state-of-the-art holo-reality system. This was before imps and tacs, of course. We turned the ground floor into a masquerade ball at Dracula's castle complete with vampire dinner guests in skanky, gothic outfits. The gag was that the frarority members would dress up like vampires and chat up the guests, pretending to be holograms ourselves. When we found a gullible victim, we would sink our fangs into them—I mean literally bite them in the neck. It was a riot. People would scream and jump out of their skins. About an hour into things, the damn system glitches. There's a short somewhere. The others were all bitching about it so I decided to have a look.

"Next thing I know I'm tracing cables and running the built-in diagnostics. I even pried open some of the micro-projectors with tweezers. I spent the whole night fidgeting with the fucking thing. When the sun came up, I couldn't believe where the time had gone. Everyone else was passed out or hung over, but I was frizzing with energy like someone had hooked electrodes up to my brain."

"Did you fix it?"

"Fuck no. I trashed the system so bad the company wouldn't even give us a refund. But I didn't give a shit. I dropped out of college the next week and bullshitted my way through an interview to get a job installing holo-reality systems. When I finished a project, the feeling was indescribable. At the flip of a switch this whole world would come to life, the palace of the grand marajah, a simulated moon-base, a bordelo, it didn't matter. For the first time in my life, I could point to something and say, I did that. Little ole me brought a tiny pocket of order out of this great big fucking entropy machine that is the universe. But that was also the saddest moment because then the old meaninglessness would start to seep back in—so I had to move on to the next project post haste. That made my employer happy, of course, and I got pretty damn good at fixing things. I installed a system on a moon freight shuttle and caught the eye of the system engineer. One thing led to another and I wound up aboard the Harbinger."

"That's a moving biography and all," Jarvis said. "But is there a point to this?"

"That feeling I had when I fixed something, now I can experience that whenever I want. I live in a constant state of epiphany."

"So you have the ability to delude yourself. I hardly see how that's a laudable milestone. Any number of psychotropic chemicals can achieve the same effect."

"Not the way I can. My affective state is fully under my conscious control. It's like there is this gearbox in my head. If I want to experience sexual climax right now, it's only a thought away."

Daniels's eyes dilated and her breasts became full and firm. Projecting from roseate aureoles, now goose-pimple free, the nipples were hard and pink as pencil erasers. They twitched in time to her quickening pulse. Jarvis was instantly stiff. "Imagine being able to choose the ideal emotional state based on rational analysis of your objectives. Solving quantum mechanical equations can literally feel orgasmic."

Jarvis almost reached for his cock. He counted to three, allowing time for the drive suppressors to kick in. Damn. He'd never been so instantly turned on before—except for Tess perhaps. "If you walked around horny all the time, wouldn't you turn into an absent-minded professor? Wouldn't you even forget to eat and drink?"

The rigidity went out of her nipples and her pupils shrank back to normal size. "It would be foolish to forego sustenance since that would impair my ability in the long run. But hunger and thirst need not be the unwelcome distractions they once were. I can block them out entirely, but I prefer to dial them up or down as befits the situation."

"We already have nerve gates for that sort of thing."

"Ha, those crude things. That's like steering a kayak with a captain's wheel. My control extends to all my perceptions and sensations as well. Imagine if every drink of water could taste like the best you ever had."

"Seems like that would get old after awhile."

"Not at all. There is no law of nature that dictates that each sip of water should diminish in pleasure from the one before. Indeed, why should pleasure not increase with repeated exposure? Only because evolution has programmed us to be restless and novelty-seeking. But conscious willfulness can accomplish much more without any of the ennui and nihilism."

"How can you be so sure that this conscious willfulness you're so proud of is not actually the over-mind of the Braunt putting thoughts into your head?"

"Does it matter where a thought originates so long as its ends are shared by humanity and all sentient life? My consciousness is not greater because it is smarter. We biological minds will never match the intelligence of our AI systems. My consciousness is greater because it grapples with more meaning and beauty and richness. That is the gift of mind-pairing. Perhaps one day humans can achieve this on their own, but that could take centuries or might never happen at all. The Braunts are offering this to us now. They can show us the way."