《The Only Gift a Portion of Thyself》作者： - Terry McGarry 【EPUB】

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The Only Gift a Portion of Thyself by Terry McGarry Some people came in here to hack off limbs, to excise eyeballs, to inflict pain and revel in gore. Some people came in for unprotected sex. Some people dropped in for a smoke. I liked them the best, the way they inflated with pleasure as they took that first drag. I watched them closely. I wondered if that's how I would look, taking my first lungful of air. None of them knew I was here. The ones I tagged as aberrant received an obligatory-therapy notice and were, as far as I could tell from what I monitored, none the wiser. The exhibitionists who came in looking for an audience created one for themselves --and there were times, after you'd seen enough pathetic Hamlets and horrendous standup comics, when you wished you had a choice. Choices are a concept very new to me. * * * She had never come in before. I'd heard theories, expressed by subjects in other projection scenarios, that there could be people like her, who didn't need it. They had enough Outside to fulfill them; they couldn't wish for anything more. Some of them thought it was psychologically or morally dangerous, to have a place where you could do anything you wanted to with no repercussions. Perhaps they would be comforted if they knew of my presence. She was certainly surprised to find me; but she was far less surprised at that than I was to find that she could see me. It was not supposed to work that way. She came in on an assignment from college, and she clearly resented it. A lot of schools required interspace as a creative exercise, to be saved to disk and handed in. Hers, she had informed the system, was to interact in some historical time period. A pale-skinned brunette, she was sitting on a crate in a Conestoga wagon, groaning, her stomach upset from the jolting. "This is stupid," she said, to no one, knowing that her teacher would hear it when it was played back in vicarity mode. "I could have told you myself that this would be uncomfortable; what was wrong with my paper on the trials of women on the Oregon Trail? I hereby lodge my complaint at this double-checking of my imagination. I imagined this perfectly well in my own mind, and