The transformation was not a journey, but an awakening. In one moment, Richard was a brain bound to a dying body, and the next he was the expanse. Cyberspace was not the hard, clinical matrix of science fiction. It was a living, breathing universe of information. The sky was a massive, crystal dome of interconnected logic gates, emitting every shade of blue from the haze-laden cerulean of a warm summer day to the deep, dark indigo of a quantum ocean. Here, the ground was not solid, but a fluid, moving tapestry of streams of information—rivers of medical knowledge, mountains of genes, forests of accounts of the past, all emitting the same gentle, inner light that had lit up his own flesh.
This was the Pharmaco Nexus. The world-soul he had coaxed into the world.
He possessed a form here, a
