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but now, amazed into objectivity,

    she questioned that this un-human body could lose its

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    senses. Robot machine synthetic simulacrum whatever it was, how could it sleep? A voice sang in the wall: Play me.
    She turned. One of the mirrors had opaqued. A silver disc pulsed softly. I am a recorded tape. Play me, repeated the voice.
    Incidental to her contemplation, she had happened on various tricks of the room. How all the walls and the
window could be altered to other things plastase silk, electrobook screen, trivision receiver, multicolored
     

     
     
    kaleidoscope. A chute brought food from a service unit in the kitchen below. A panel lifted to reveal a sea-shade bathroom...

    Play me! whined the tape machine.
    She reached to depress its button. Her movements generally commenced naturally now, changing halfway as awareness of what she did unbalanced her into confusion. This is not myself. This is
    Playmel
    She pressed the button into its socket, and Claudio's voice, calm and accurate as a machine itself, emanated from the disc.
    "Listen, Magdala, and listen assiduously. I have recorded this especially for your benefit. And mine. I don't want to give you the data, face to face. It would bore me. It would, I admit, disturb me. To look at you, and explain you to yourself. Because you are yourself now. There'll probably never be any occasion for you to revert to what you were before, that thing lying in the maintenance capsule. You can disown that, even if you won't ever quite be able to ignore it. Are you listening? Don't let your mind wander. I am going to tell you everything I consider you should know about your unique condition. Concentrate. This relates to your survival."
    She obeyed. Obedience was a nearly foolproof method of coping with both the situation and the man.
    I’ll put it into simple terms. You won't understand it otherwise, will you? And you have to understand. You
    can't sur-

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    vive unless you do. Let me explain the phenomena itself, first. My God, it occurs to me that perhaps you have religion, Magdala, Modernist Christianity or Totalism. If that's your problem, you'll presume I've transferred your animus your soul from one body to another. Well, if you presumed that, erase it. You haven't actually gone anywhere -not soul, not even mind. You're still imprisoned, in point of fact, within that lump of foul accidental composition in which I located you. So what's different? It's your consciousness that's been shifted. That and that alone.

    I’ll give you an analogy. It's fair. It may help you. A dream. You he asleep, tissues, bones, blood, organs,
    brain, complete and in the same place. But the dreaming faculty of your mind convinces you you're
    elsewhere. Your body stays where it is, but your dream insists you are what? possibly swimming in a cold ocean. Second analogy, better than the first the sensit. You enter a crowded theatre, put a headset on, and the sensit puts you, cerebrally, into a desert. You experience the sand, the hot winds, you smell the dust. Dream or sensit, that other place seems real. It isn't, but it seems to be. And that's what's happening to you now, Magdala, your consciousness has transferred wholly from your own unlovely head to a crystal
conductor in the skull of a simulate woman. It's a sensit dream, but, Christ, the most fantastic sensit of them
all, because this is real. You've got a body that factually will be doing whatever you experience. You've got a body that will come to follow your neural instructions as instinctively and as swiftly as your physical body
did. While your physical body will perform none of these actions, will He quiescent in its capsule. It doesn't need much from you now, that physical body. It's just the powerhouse, the brain that provides your consciousness with its life. But you can't turn it off, any more than any other powerhouse. You can't forget it. You can't abandon it. It's the last and only millstone around your neck. It's a symbiote, a