And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now--
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now--
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding--
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
Where is Case? Is he lying on a bed in Cheap Hotel? Is he an electric pulse along a wire, a mote of light within a fiber optic cable? Is he within a construct of his own mind? Or one constructed by someone else?
