She sits back on her heels, realizes she's naked, and opens her eyes. Everything's confusingly strange, even though it shouldn't be. There's a moment of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed — then they respond. It all feels strangely familiar to her, like waking up again inside a house she grew up in and moved away from years ago.

[…]

Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp hair, the faint caress of a breeze — she reaches out with another sense and tries to grab hold of reality, but it slithers away, intransigent and unembedded. Everything around her is so solid and immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of claustrophobic panic: Help! I'm trapped in the real universe!

In April, the callow lilies came back. They stretched their baby angel wings out and reached for the world. Gently, their tendrils caressed the sullen fence posts until even they lilted lovelier.

From her bedroom window, Lara watched the lilies […] She wanted to paint them, so she opened a new Flash template. A blank movie this time.

She set her cursor loose in the garden of her movie’s viewable area. Vector white lines below shorter vector yellow lines. She selected the white lines and grouped them together. She even moved them to a new layer entitled “Cry, Baby Angel, Cry.” Then she converted them into a graphic object and moved them to the library.

Pierre misses the next bit, because someone has just goosed him on the left buttock. He starts and half turns to see Su Ang looking past him at the throne, a lady-in-waiting for the queen. She wears an apricot dress with tight sleeves and a bodice that bares everything above her nipples. There's a fortune in pearls roped into her hair. As he notices her, she winks at him.

Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces him. “Are we alone now?” she asks.

“Guess so. You want to talk about something?” he asks, heat rising in his cheeks. The noise around them is a random susurrus of machine-generated crowd scenery, the people motionless as their shared reality thread proceeds independently of the rest of the universe.

“Of course!” She smiles at him and shrugs. The effect on her chest is remarkable — those period bodices could give a skeleton a cleavage — and she winks at him again. “Oh, Pierre.” She smiles. “So easily distracted!” She snaps her fingers, and her clothing cycles through Afghani burqua, nudity, trouser suit, then back to court finery. Her grin is the only constant.

[…]

“Not now,” he says. “Let's go back.”

“Okay.” She nods, then turns away, steps behind him with a swish of skirts, and he unfreezes time again as they snap back into place within the larger universe.

There is, for example, a performance of Czech mimes or Thai dancers at the theather where I go with my wife and a friend, and I know that once the show starts I am going to find it all marvelous. I am entertained, deeply moved; the dialogues or the dancers' motions seem like supernatural visions to me. I applaud wildly, and sometimes the tears well up in my eyes or I laugh until I have to pee; in any event, I am glad to be alive and to have had this opportunity to go to the theater or to the movies or to an exhibition, anywhere extraordinary people make or show things never before imagined, where they invent a place of revelation or communication, something that washes away the moments when nothing is happening, nothing but what always happens.

So I am overwhelmed, I am so delighted that at the intermission I rise up enthusiastically and continue to applaud at length, and I tell my wife that the mimes are a marvel and that the scene where the fisherman casts out his line and hauls in a phosphorescent fish half the height of the stage is absolutely fantastic.

Our every digital track, once lost in the blowing dust of a presearch world, can now be tagged, recorded, and held in the amber of a perpetual index.

Instead of space, why not organize around meaning? Perhaps the whole idea of a document existing in a physical location—in a folder, say, or on the desktop—is just a hollow legacy carried over needlessly from the limitations of the real world. Perhaps we simply required those spatial coordinates to ease us across the digital frontier, and now that we've acclimated to the new environment, we can shed those old habits of thought like the space shuttle tossing off its solid rocket boosters after a successful launch.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Lara's smile reflected across the glass of her monitor. She chose the text tool and in 42 point serif typed: “Dad.” She created a path for it and let it tween off the right side of the screen. She cried long after it was gone.