Clay set up a subvocalization bud to provide a "voice" for Khorun. She'd spent a bit of time getting the tone and timbre just right, fiddling with sound manipulator software. She set a pair of junky speakers when she next logged in, and had Khorun speak to Madam Greensmoke.

"What hath God wrought?" the tall, muscular man said in a deep, resonant voice.

The tall, muscular man wearing only underwear, Clay was reminded.

Tailor Wing's shop was a dim, crowded place. Bolts of cloth shouldered Khorun into a narrow, twisting path toward the thin voice greeting him from the back.

"Hello!" said Tailor Wing. "You have no clothes."

"Yes," Clay said. The bud at her neck was working fine to transmit her voice, but perhaps she needed to have some sort of earphones so she could hear dialog, as well. Reading it on the flatscreen was a touch tedious, and besides, part of her wanted to make the experience as immersive as it could be.

Tailor Wing handed Khorun a simple white kilt of thin cloth. "There; that should fit. You can pay me for it later."

"Or perhaps there is something I could do for you?" Khorun asked.

Tailor Wing produced no dialog onscreen for half a minute. Khorun was about to turn away when Tailor Wing said, "Bletchley."

Clay frowned. "Beg pardon?" she said.

"'Bletchley' is how you'll know it's me, Granny Clay."

"Raf!" Clay nearly shouted. She watched carefully to see any further dialog. Several long moments stretched.

"Deliver that bolt of cloth to Merchant Wei, down at the river," Tailor Wing said. Clay let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, and selected the indicated bolt of cloth with a sigh. At least now she had some way of knowing when she was interacting with Raf, and not another live person or facet of the Neuronet.

If she could program a crawlbot and let it loose in PERSEUS to hunt for "Bletchley" and get a sort of information trail for Raf's presence... She leaned forward and reached out for the keyboard to start making notes. The Crown tugged at its cable. Clay stopped and pulled the Crown off her head. One of the contact points caught on the earpiece of her glasses; they tilted up, tipped on the bridge of her nose, and fell to the floor before Clay could put a hand out to catch them.

She winced when she heard the "crack" of them hitting the floor.

She set the Crown aside on the desk and looked down at the glasses. The one arm had come loose. She picked them up, looking at them with the inside and outside edge of one eye. The arm was not just loose, but flat out broken. The corner had turned into a sharp edge and torn a couple of wire filaments; the arm dangled from the intact filaments.

Clay sighed. "Vonzell!" she yelled. "My glasses broke. I need to see the ophthalmologist ASAP."

"Yes, Miss Clay," Vonzell called from the kitchen.

Clay considered the broken eyeglasses. Two of the half-dozen strands were already broken; there was nothing for it, she thought, but to cut the others and see what she could do. She took a pair of fine snips and cut them as close to the lens edge as possible. She laid the arm on the desk beside her electronics equipment. She sat back in her chair, fingers steepled, and began to think.

It was not too much later that she was snapped to attention by Vonzell softly clearing their throat. "Miss Clay, they say they can't see you till next week." Clay started to say something but Vonzell continued, "But I asked them to call us if there were any cancellations."

"Very good," Clay said. "Oh, and I need a vacuum flask of liquid nitrogen. And I'm thinking Chinese for dinner tonight."

"Will that be all, Miss Clay?" Vonzell asked.

"Oh, yes, thank you, Vonzell." Vonzell knew Clay was in that state of mind in which she missed small social cues--like sarcasm.

Vonzell looked heavenward, shaking their head, and mouthed a silent prayer before leaving the room.

Clay fretted. She couldn't make any progress on playing the game. She could use a voice reader to go through some of the documentation, but it was clear it didn't contain the details of the Everhome implementation. I'm effectively blind, metaphorically and literally, Clay thought. I don't even have as much info as a longtime player--

The players, Clay thought. That's it.

She navigated to the most popular of communities where players hung out. It was tedious to skim for relevant subjects with the voice reader speaking the words much more slowly than she could read them, but she paired it with narrow searches and started to get information about the game. There had always been MMO players eager to look under the hood, and Everhome was no different. It was intended to be relatively opaque, but someone had started a project whereby a number of players could use a special data collector and send it to an aggregator, who then crunched the data and let people know, for instance, that Khorun's turtle nemesis had a whopping 60 hit points, while Khorun himself had 80. Probably. That was Clay's best guess based on the accumulated class info; Khorun was a bit of a hybrid.

In that regard, Clay thought about whether she could tack on skills to her class-less character. There were plenty of discussions about people's "ideal character build" and she took a number of ideas from that. Many of the choicest skills were level-dependent, of course, but there were others she could research how to replicate. She remembered Tai-shan had had a way of attaching attributes to individuals: not just factional information and details like rank, but traits such as their ability to remain cool in a firefight or perform field repairs on equipment. Perhaps the ability to leap 10 meters with just a thought was no different, aside from it breaking Earth's physical rules.

Over spicy orange chicken, Clay thought back to her time working on PERSEUS and the Tai-shan implementation of it. She had felt certain it was going to be so big, something that rivaled the insane openness and possibility of Bartle and Trubshaw's original MUD, which Clay's uncle had shown her when she was still a gawky teen. Svetlana was born as a Dungeons & Dragons character not long after that.

It wasn't just the creative and intellectual challenge that drove her on PERSEUS; while it had some of the air of a game, she felt she was doing work that was potentially of strategic importance. Her father having been a lifelong Foreign Service officer instilled in Clay a sense of duty to government and to country, the two being almost always mutually compatible. She remembered in her late teens she threatened to join the military--the Army, no less--just to spite him. "Clay, you are meant for better things," he had said. He had taken her threat seriously enough that he offered to pay for her time at a Canadian university to study The Program.

Oh, he knew about her yearning for The Program, as she had always referred to it. It was a new interdisciplinary curriculum, comprising, as her well-thumbed copy of the course catalogue showed, not just computer coding and network engineering, but advanced, practically theoretical mathematics, psychology, and even philosophy. The latter asked, What is intelligence? The computing courses attempted to take the answer and create the holy grail: the world's first true artificial intelligence. It was born of the clumsy optimism that came as microcomputers began to show their promise at the dawn of the 1980s: anything was possible, it was thought, if the right coding stratagem was combined with sufficient computing power.

It was ultimately horseshit, Clay knew. The more they learned about human intelligence, the less they knew about how to make computers "think." They had barely come much farther than creating more and more sophisticated versions of ELIZA, chatbots that eventually failed the Turing test of persuading the user that they were human. And when people were promised an AI in a program that didn't deliver, they were pissed. They felt as hoodwinked as the people who had lost at chess to the Mechanical Turk only to find out years later that the proto-android's movements on the chessboard were guided by a man hiding inside a box.

Setting aside some of the orange chicken for later--part of growing old was a fading appetite--Clay didn't return online. Listening her way through dead ends of semi-helpful conversations was exhausting. She was glad she'd soon be done with it; life online had always sucked for those without fully functional vision. She listened to a bit of music to soothe herself, then went to bed.

Along with loss of appetite, age brought an inability to sleep through the night. At least that was usually the case; Clay woke up with the sun well above the horizon. She saw a courier had brought the liquid nitrogen and she rubbed her hands together in anticipation.

She took the vacuum flask to her workbench, grabbing a hand towel along the way. She set the flask next to the arm of her glasses, then looked among her tools. First she took the filament clamps, then bypassed all her detail-work electronics tools for the implement she needed: a hammer.

Clay stood up and opened the flask. She held the exposed eyeglass filaments with the clamp, then lowered the plastic eyeglasses arm into the fog-pouring cylinder of the flask. She held it there for a long five-count, then pulled it out and set it down on the workbench. She tossed the folded towel on the arm, then brought down the flat side of the hammer on it, cracking all along its length with a series of sharp blows. It hurt her wrist a tiny bit, but was surprisingly satisfying.

She let the whole thing thaw for a few minutes, removed the towel, and picked apart the plastic shards from the wires. They didn't all let go, and the end result wasn't pretty, but she had a potential input source for the cortical implant Dr. Dobelle had invented in the previous century to compensate for fading retinas.

Clay logged in to Everhome's Jade Kingdom and opened the PERSEUS console to bring Khorun back. Next was moving the PERSEUS view over. She disconnected the system output and used a high-magnification lens and lamp to see well enough to connect it to a code-a-box. Next came hooking up the eyeglass wires and pairing them to the output in the box. She occasionally touched the contact from the glasses' earpiece to her implant spot, checking to see if she got an image. Finally, a black box with white lines appeared in the very center of her vision.

She smiled and held the little metal disc up to her head a couple of times. She took a moment to consider, then nodded to herself, stood up on knees that rewarded her with pain for doing so, and went to the bathroom. She took an electric razor and shaved the area in front of her ear. She went back to her workbench and desk with a roll of surgical tape and taped the contact directly to her head.

A sudden thought struck her. If the cortical implant weren't just limited to the retina... She played around with PERSEUS output, then adjusted the code-a-box. She entered one last set of directions then leaned back.

"Oh, yes," Clay said, as the white-on-black metaworld of PERSEUS filled her entire field of vision. "Yes, this will do very nicely indeed."