The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (65 page)

Prime Intellect's brow crinkled. "I don't understand."
"No, you wouldn't. Let me ask you something. If I leave here...if I go back to civilization...does this forest continue to exist?"
"I can leave it running in your absence if you want."
Caroline wanted to throw up. Now even the forest wasn't real. Nothing was real. "Don't bother. Get rid of it."
Instantly, it disappeared. She was standing in an antiseptically white space so pure and seamless and bright that the eye balked at reporting it to the brain. She was standing on a hard, smooth surface, but it was not visible. There were no shadows. There was no horizon; the floor and the sky looked exactly the same, and there was no transition from one to the other. She might have been standing on the inside of some enormous white ball.
Prime Intellect was still there. "What is this?" she asked.
"Neutral reality," Prime Intellect said. "The minimum landscape which supports human existence. Actually, not quite the minimum. I could get rid of the floor. But that would have startled you."
"And from here I can go anywhere?"
"You don't have to pass through here. You told me to get rid of the landscape, and you didn't tell me what to replace it with."
"I want reality. The real world. The real Arkansas."
"There is no Arkansas which is any more 'real' than any other. That's what I'm trying to tell you. You can define reality. You can
make
it real." It was trying to be helpful; it was almost pathetic in its earnestness to make her understand how much it could help her. It couldn't understand why she was getting upset again.
"In other words, this is reality. You can just paint it up to look like whatever I want." She thought: That's why the forest seemed different. It was an imitation. And it wasn't quite exact.
"You could look at it that way."