Beyond the experiment itself, though, it was clear to hernow that she couldn’t leave Mimosa without doing at least one thingthat went against the grain. After five years of monastic restraint,five years of denying herself the dishonest comforts of virtualreality, she was sick of placing that principle above everything else.Beyond the fact that this disembodiment would beentirely in the service of honesty, she needed, very badly, to dragherself out of the absolutist rut she’d been digging from the momentshe’d arrived. If she’d compromised a little from the start, maybe shewouldn’t have felt the same sense of desperation. But it was too latenow for half-measures. If she returned to Earth unchanged,it wouldn’t be a triumph of integrity. It would be a kind of death.She’d implode into something as hermetic and immutable as a black hole.

All this, weighed against the thing she hated most: lackof control. Every choice she made rendered meaningless. Whatchoices, though? Her clones would run for a few subjectiveminutes, most of them in rapt attention as the data poured in. What wasthe worst that one of these transient selves might do? Utter a fewunkind words to Livia or Darsono? Disclose some small guilty secretfrom her past to people who either wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t care,or at the very least, wouldn’t have the chance to reproach her forlong? She wasn’t opening up the gates to the old human nightmare:endless varieties of suffering, endless varieties of stupidity, endlessvarieties of banality. She would diffuse a very small distance into thespace of possibilities, and whatever unhappiness she might experience,whatever misdemeanors she might commit, would be erased beyond recovery.

Rainzi looked skeptical, and she couldn’t blame him. Butthere was no time left for him to play devil’s advocate, to test herresolve. Cass stood her ground, silently, and after a moment he noddedassent.