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said.
    “She’s still mighty pretty.”
    THE VISITOR’S CENTER WAS PRACTICALLY DESERTED . IT looked exactly the same as it always did. The same powder-blue carpet with sensory enhancers so that it felt as if you were walking on blue marshmallows, even though, if you looked down at your feet, they weren’t really sinking at all. The same murals of farmlands that glowed just after a rain, mountains that pierced the clouds, and cities that looked like a fleet of rocket ships ready to blast off. The waiting room for heaven.
    The only person there was Victor, the same security guard who was always there—a Construct with feline features whose skin glowed like neon. He nodded at Lawrence as he passed, loping back and forth year after year like an animal in a pen.
    They stepped into the two closest VIMs—Visitor Interface Modules, called coffins since they looked like streamlined caskets—and settled back into the soft cushions as the lids whirred closed automatically and the coffins slowly rotated to a horizontal position. The orientation tape droned the same assurances of safety and warnings about visiting too long that it’d been droning for thirty-one years, and then everything vibrated like a tuning fork. Nemo felt as if he’d fallen a mile in three seconds. The coffin rotated to a vertical position, and the lid swung open, and there he was, in the Bin, though it looked as if he hadn’t gone anywhere. The same carpet, the same murals, the same everything. He got out, knowing his body, his real body, hadn’t moved at all.
    Not that you could tell the difference. There were people who claimed they could tell—detect a blur if they moved too fast, or taste the difference between a real steak and a virtual one. They were kidding themselves. That was exactly what was wrong with the Bin—you couldn’t tell the difference. You were so many electrons blissfully bashing around inside of acres of silicon, and you didn’t know the difference.
    From Pentagon Station in the Bin, they caught a train to Front Royal. There wasn’t a real train to Front Royal. It was an invention of the Bin—time marching on and all that. Nemo had always figured they could just zap people around in the Bin anywhere they wanted without the fiction of trains or planes. But that wouldn’t be real, and reality was what the Bin was all about—reality, only better. They’d found that people needed space and time and the illusion of a body moving through both, or they’d often go crazy. It was only death they wanted to do without, death and the many forms of dying. Physical death, at least.
    The Metro in the Bin was exactly like the real one, but free of graffiti and packed with people. They were all talking and laughing without a care in the world. Everyone had a place in the Bin. They could work or not. Travel, stay put. Eat, sleep, make love. Watching their smug faces, Nemo wanted to tear their hearts out. But he couldn’t have, even if he’d been the type. You couldn’t murder anyone in the Bin. The only true violence allowed was suicide. Everyone, Nemo’s government teacher had intoned, has the right to die, if they so chose.
    The couple in front of him, young and pretty and tanned, were planning a vacation to the Rockies. Nothing had changed in here. Try going to the Rockies in the real world, Nemo wanted to say to them. Highways shot to hell. No gas anyway. The mountains full of gun-toting survivalist crazies training for an invasion from space or something. But these people didn’t have to worry about that. They had the world they’d been used to—consensual reality, they called it—but all fixed up with no crime or disease or death. You’d have to a be a fool to turn down a deal like that, wouldn’t you? That’s what everybody said. Every fucking body. By the time he reached his parents’ house, Nemo had gotten himself so worked up he wanted to turn around and go back home.
    “I CAN’T DO THIS , LAWRENCE .” THEY WERE