Behind him the holograms above the Palace faded in the early sun. In his mind, they burned.

These days you couldn’t keep things separate even in your mind. If we could only disconnect—

He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over, it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X- and Y- chromosomes.

...the smell of cigarette smoke, the blue light of morning through the polygon panes of the geodesic roof, the green light from the screen, the black letters trickling up it in indented lines like poetry in a language he didn't know.But he knew it now, recognized the code as the key.And his fingers began to spell it out.

The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from AI-and-I to I-and-I.There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors.The stars threw down their spears.Someone smiled. His work to see.The connection broke.

... ideas are exactly as interested in the brains they're in as genes are in the bodies they're in: just enough to get themselves copied...Like computer viruses.

Do AIS dream in electric sleep?He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares.

White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.