Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata Read Free Book Online Page A

in double plastic, with the handlers wearing environment suits. A trio of cindies was sent in to attend to the residue.
    Virgil stayed in his office, curled on the couch, listening to the robots vacuum and scrub, their limbs clicking and ratcheting as they crawled over the chair. Aerostat cameras hovered in every room, even the bathroom, watching everything. Virgil wondered what would happen if he plucked a L ov from his brow and flushed it down the toilet. He laughed. The plumbing had probably been switched off.
    He fell asleep before the cindies finished. He knew it only when he awoke, his mind switching from sleep to wakefulness with no transition phase and no memory of dreams. Ever since he’d had the L ov s he’d awakened like this. It made him wonder what went on in his head when he wasn’t there.
    He reached for his farsights, then remembered: Kanaha had taken them. The detective would not be able to get anything out of them, of course. Iris would erase any data stored in the farsights as soon as it detected a stranger handling them. The R osa would sever contact, biding on its anonymous server until Virgil called it out once again. Everything the R osa handled, from mail to voice-links to research, was anonymous and encrypted. The police could not track its location unless Virgil gave it away, and even then, they could not decrypt the data it contained. Iris, at least, would never be a witness against him.
    He sat up on the couch, feeling a hundred years old.
    What time was it, anyway?
    Whatever time it was, he should call his parents.
    No farsights of course.
    The realization came as a relief. The thought of facing his parents, of explaining to them why he had blown his existence . . . it gave him a sick feeling, and he could not bring himself to do it.
    In truth he rarely felt comfortable talking about himself or his beliefs, his motivations. He knew too well that his world—an emergent world arising from the intricate, unpredictable, remorseless dance of physical laws and quantum chance—was utterly different from the world perceived by almost anyone he might pass randomly on the street.
    He had spent his life gazing at life—he thought of it as Life, boldly set with a capital letter, and in his mind this Life encompassed not just those organic assemblages that were living things, but also the environment that contained them, the laws of complexity that gave them existence, the information systems that let them think and grow and reproduce, and the perpetual war they fought against entropy so that something could exist, instead of a homogeneous nothing. He had looked into all these aspects and what he had seen—evidenced everywhere, apparent in everything—was the common origin of all things.
    Life had emerged from the plasmas of creation because life was allowed by the physical constants of the Universe. The interplay of elemental particles had led to simple atoms that became stars that in the explosive forge of supernovas created atoms more complex that led to molecules evolving into organisms that thought. Every step along the way, at every level of definition, from quantum particles to nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, astrophysics, neurology, climate, psychology, genetics, evolution, ecology, and faith, it was all one: an utterly integrated, self-contained system.
    A poignantly beautiful system.
    But grim, austere, and ugly, too. Virgil would never deny that. In this world so much could be lost so easily to ruthless chance. He had always known it. Now, with Gabrielle’s loss, he felt the precarious nature of his own existence. It made him afraid, but it made him defiant too. He knew that tragedy could demand no revision of his belief. It could elicit no angry protestations that he had been deceived or betrayed by an unseen god, because no promises had ever been made. Like the old bumper stickers used to say, shit was a thing that happened. One had to live with it, or die.
    And still this was an