Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

They'd closed it six months later, but his mom had taken him five times that summer. Every time, he'd tried to measure the waterline. He'd stood in the shallows, lowered his nose until the waves were halfway up his eyeballs, and tried to compare the world above and below.
"The water was chlorinated." She interrupted.
"And it burned like hell." Firenze agreed. He opened his eyes and allowed the hardjack to resume full sensory simulation.
Across from him, Lauren was still seated on the chair, but her pipe had vanished. She asked, "Did you ever see anything?"
He snorted and reached for the glass on the table. They'd spent good hours on this drink, making sure it was cold and bright, with little beads of condensation that slicked his fingers. It was very real. So real, in fact, that it was hard to remember that the glass hadn't been there, mere moments before. He answered, "I saw a blue blur, lots of light, and then got smacked in the face with a ball. Every time."
"I think that's allegorical." She quipped.
"Or at least symbolic." He agreed.
He glanced at the painting over the fireplace mantle, and it became a window-mirror. In it, he saw a room much like this one but inverted in every way. Gone were the leather chairs, replaced by cast plastics. Gone was the fireplace, replaced by junk hardware and a guts-open wall terminal. Gone too was the chaise lounge, replaced by a stained foam-mattress and a pile of foil wrappers. Upon that bed, a skinny young man sprawled amid a mass of wires, his eyes flicking to-and-fro in the depths of a fever-sweat. He snapped his gaze away in reflex.
"You're doing fine. I'd warn you if you weren't." Lauren stated. She almost sounded hurt. Unlike him, she kept watching the mirror, and advised, "Your pulse is a little high, probably feedback from trying to catch the waterline."
Firenze didn't bother with a witty comeback. Sometimes, it was better to just shut up and let the mask win.
In the back of his head, he heard Professor Neland lecturing him on mask development, reminding him that it was not real, and scolding him that the adaptive code mimicked desirable behavior triggers from the user. Memory-Neland advised him that masks optimized towards synergy and how this process could create a simulacrum of personhood. In the back corners of his mind, Firenze could picture the reams of hard code, tens of thousands of pages of raw data, and the discrete text of a pseudo-intelligence. Those memories were hard to call upon, though, when he sat in a chair that was not a chair, could feel the bumps of false metal fasteners under his fingertips, and could taste the not-quite-taste of water which was not water. Any confusion he might have felt washed away with the sudden weight on his lap and the press of fingers on his cheek.
Lausen turned his face towards hers, pulled his stare to meet her own, and asked, "Am I real?" This was no joke, no flirtation, just the question. Her fingers intertwined with his, and she pinned their hands on her chest. He could smell the shampoo on her hair, feel her breath when she spoke.
His was buzzing again, alight with broken code he'd almost seen when the world jumped and with the sudden collision of clean neural input straining against root limbic processes. The sane response, the response he should have taken, was to pull the plug and purge the system. His objectivity was compromised.
The moon shone in her eyes, and her hair was framed by firelight. She denied him an escape and silently echoed the question. He could not evade the realness nor retreat into an analysis, not with her breath on his cheek. Despite himself, he leaned towards her.
He caught himself before he abandoned perspective. He pushed her to arms-length and forced himself to review the base code. He'd seen it in pieces and assembled the whole. This was not real.
Her smile turned melancholic, and she held up their intertwined hands. She recited, "This is a physical sensation, sensory input predicated upon a nervous system and mimicked via direct neural stimulation. You see me because you've coded the interface. You feel me because the hardjack conveys that you should. These things are not real."
He couldn't look her in the eyes, chose to focus on the overloaded bookshelves. She was reciting facts, but why did she have to sound so broken about it? He knew the answer, but it didn't help: adaptive code mimicked a living mind. No one would enjoy the idea of not existing. It was a sterile and unhelpful solution.
She squeezed his hand, pulled his attention back, and continued, "But you experience the physical world through your nervous system as your genetics have been coded to transcribe. A texture is rough or smooth. A temperature is hot or cold. You understand these things as real because you've never been without them. You could be just as unreal as the code you review."
That was nearly a quote. 'The virtual world is as real as our own.' He'd said that in a lecture two semesters ago, covering immersion, direct interfaces, risks, and benefits. He was hearing his own words, looped upon him through the mask. That made sense. Adaptive code would mimic the user to become more symbiotic, to increase the efficiency of interaction.
Firenze had his answer. He pulled her towards him and admitted, "I have no idea." He watched her smile return, and he added, "I believe that I exist because I am aware of my own thinking. Anything beyond is faith and trust. All I can do is ask, 'do you think you exist?'"
Her eyes darted to the side. That was a tell, an indication she was scanning some database. He hadn't programmed that tic, not directly, but he'd allowed her to adapt constraints for analogous human body language. Her selective integration of those prompts had been an emergent result.
She answered, "I think so. But I might