The Dragon Man Part 3

"She likes looking, though," Sara said. "She's not a real real junkie-but I'm not sure that I am, either. I just like dragons. I saw the Dragon Man at the swap." junkie-but I'm not sure that I am, either. I just like dragons. I saw the Dragon Man at the swap."

"Did you? How did he seem?"

"I don't know," Sara said, realizing that she didn't have any standard for comparison. "He was in a robocab that pulled up behind us. He saw us, but he went the other way and we didn't b.u.mp into one another again. I never saw anyone that old before. Will you look like that in another hundred years?"

"I doubt it," Father Lemuel said, soberly. "n.o.body knows how long people with my kind of IT will be able to live, or exactly what will happen when it begins it fail, but I won't have to suffer the kind of ham-fisted repairs that he had to undergo when IT was in its infancy. He's more cyborg than I'll ever need to be."

Sara knew that everyone with Internal Technology-or even a smartsuit-was a cyborg of sorts, but that the term was only used for people who had considerable quant.i.ties of inorganic material integrated into their bodies.

"Can't they take the old repairs out and make new ones?" Sara asked.

"It's not that easy. It's safer to leave the old patches in place and keep adding new ones-if they tried to strip him back to the bare flesh, it would probably kill him. There aren't many of his kind left-and most of the others spend even more time in virtual s.p.a.ce than I do. He's old in a way that people like us will probably never experience. People are picked off by accidents all the time, and there are still a few diseases that take their toll, but hardly anyone dies of old age old age any more. When Frank and his kindred are gone, we'll never see their like again." any more. When Frank and his kindred are gone, we'll never see their like again."

Sara thought about that for a moment or two. "But he must have the same Internal Technology as you have," she said. "Unless you're much richer than he is. So why will he die of old age if you won't?"

"Money doesn't make that much difference," Father Lemuel told her. "And I suppose I might get to die of old age if I'm lucky-or do I mean unlucky? Anyway, Frank had already done most of his aging before he was fitted with the first primitive IT suites; he's been preserved, but not rejuvenated. He's lasted a lot longer than he or anyone else expected, given that so much damage had already been done, and bearing in mind that he's had a couple of bad accidents along the way. He's tough-n.o.body knows what he might yet be capable of, including him."

"He must remember the Crash," Sara said, to prompt further revelations. "That must be weird."

"After a fas.h.i.+on," Father Lemuel agreed. "As you get older, your distant memories are edited down, but they never disappear. You lose the sense of having been there, though-I don't suppose that Frank's memories of the Crash are very much different from the impressions other people obtain by studying history, or surrounding themselves with collections of pre-Crash junk."

"I always thought they called him the Dragon Man because of the dragon in his shop window," Sara said. "I didn't know he looked...different."

"He doesn't really have to," Father Lemuel said, pensively. "He could program his smartsuit to provide the illusion of a face much like anyone else's. I once asked him why he didn't, but all he said was that other people could program their smartsuits to look like him if they wanted to, and if they weren't prepared to take the trouble, why should he? It's not so surprising, when you consider that he's always made his living helping people to look different and distinctive. His smartsuit covers up his tattoos, though-and he still has those, from way back. He dresses very conservatively, but wearing a mask to complete the picture is a step too far, in his way of thinking. It's just the way he is-I don't think he's trying to make a point, parading himself as a walking memento mori memento mori."

"What's a memento mori memento mori?" Sara asked.

"A reminder that we're all mortal. Even now. Even if we can live forever-which we probably can't-we won't. Accident or disaster will get us in the end. We're not immortal with an eye-double-em, and probably not even emortal with an ee. We can always be killed-any day, any moment. That's why it's really not a good idea to go climbing without the proper equipment, Sara. You really should take precautions."

"That's not what you said at the house meeting," Sara reminded him.

"It's not a good thing for parents to become too paranoid, or to put too many restrictions in place," Father Lemuel said. "Where would it end? Forbidding you to leave the house...then your room...then your coc.o.o.n. You have to be free to calculate your own risks-and that's why you ought to calculate them in a sensible manner. You were foolish, Sara, and you didn't need to be. If you want to climb-and you should-you ought to make sure that you can't fall, or won't hurt yourself if you do. Frank Warburton's always been a climber, but he didn't get to two hundred and fifty, or however old he is, without taking precautions. You don't get to be a Dragon Man without being careful. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

Sara nodded.

"Some of the younger ones think I'm not taking this parenting business as seriously as I should," Father Lemuel observed. "They think I'm only doing it because it's one more thing to tick off on my career list. They think that I think that the fact that I put in more money than anyone else ent.i.tles me to take things easy and leave the real parenting work to them. Well, they're wrong. What I really think is that I'm a good deal older and wiser than they are, which might make me arrogant, but doesn't necessarily make the judgment incorrect. Most of them will be applying for another license at some time in the future-maybe more than one, if things go well for the world and s.p.a.ce colonization actually gets off the ground-but the chances are that you're my one and only. I take it seriously, even if you think I'm just a boring old virtuality-addict."

"I don't," Sara said. Sensing an opportunity, she said; "Can I ask you a favor, Father Lemuel?"

"Why?" he asked. "Do you think I owe you one?"

"No," she said. "But I don't think you think you owe me a no no, if you see what I mean."

"I think so," Father Lemuel admitted, with a wry smile.

"I want to take a special state-of-the-art dragon ride, but I don't have any credit...and my hood isn't...." She trailed off, not wanting to say "good enough" in case she sounded horribly ungrateful.

"Why do you want to do it?" Father Lemuel wanted to know.

Sara didn't know what sort of answer would be most acceptable, so it didn't seem to be a good time to be economical with her explanation. "I don't know," she said. "But ever since I went to see the fire fountain when I was six, and saw the dragon in Mr. Warburton's window, I've been...I mean, I know they were never real, like lions and camels, or even dinosaurs, but there's something...well, I don't suppose anyone ever went to Mr. Warburton and said draw a camel on my back draw a camel on my back, or even a Tyrannosaurus rex Tyrannosaurus rex. But they did want dragons. Golden dragons with silver bellies. And it must have really hurt, to have needles pumping that much ink into their actual skin for hours on end. And he put one in his window, didn't he? Out of all the things he'd ever drilled into anyone's flesh, he chose to put the dragon in his window. So there must be something special about dragons...even if they're all fantasy, all pretend. I want to find out what it is. I've ridden one in my hood, but that's only pretend-I can float like that in school. I want to try the new Internal Technology that works in collaboration with a coc.o.o.n."

Father Lemuel frowned when she mentioned the IT, but he didn't react the way Father Gustave or Mother Maryelle would have, with automatic revulsion. Perhaps, Sara thought, he knew more about that sort of technology than she had a.s.sumed.

Father Lemuel wasn't in any hurry to give her an answer, but he obviously didn't want to keep her in suspense either. "It can probably be arranged, if it's safe," he said. "Let me look into it."

"Thank you," Sara said, warmly. She leapt off the swing and gave him a hug.

"But next time you take it into your head to do something silly," he said. "I think you owe me a few moments' thought and a no no, don't you?"

"I'll try to remember," she promised, that being all she could actually promise with any real hope of keeping her word.

Apparently, it was enough.

CHAPTER VII.

Father Lemuel filled the syringe very carefully, then pointed the needle upwards and squeezed the plunger to expel a small air-bubble. "This might hurt, you know," he said.

"No it won't," Sara a.s.sured him. "Just make sure you hit the right spot." She had already primed her smartsuit so that it had marked the most convenient entry-point to a vein and secreted a modest amount of local anesthetic."

Father Lemuel seemed more nervous than she was, but he got the job done. Then he gave a slight sigh. "You, er, might want to keep this just between the two of us," he said.

"I won't tell anyone," she promised-perhaps a little too readily.

"It's not that it needs to be kept secret," he a.s.sured her. "I could have told the others-it's just that they'd have wanted to call a special house meeting to discuss it, for hours on end, and I'd have had to listen to Gus and Maryelle banging on yet again about parental responsibility. Not that I have anything against parental responsibility. It's just the thought of wasting all that time going over the same old ground. I'm too old for all that."

So am I, Sara wanted to say-but she daren't voice the thought, even to Father Lemuel.

"Anyway," Father Lemuel went on, "what kind of an example would we be setting if we were responsible all the time? You need to know that there's such a thing as parental irresponsibility, even in the best-regulated of households. Are you all right?"

Sara felt slightly faint, but she knew that there was no need. The thought of all those nan.o.bots sweeping through her bloodstream was a little disturbing, but she knew that she mustn't let her imagination get the better of her intelligence-not until she was safely enclosed in Father Lemuel's coc.o.o.n, when she would have to do her utmost to make sure that it did exactly that.

"Fine," she said, holding herself rigid.

Father Lemuel nodded. His coc.o.o.n was built into a corner of his spa.r.s.ely-decorated room, so discreetly that an uninformed observer might have a.s.sumed that it was nothing more than a blister. A hometree's walls were p.r.o.ne to the occasional disease that generated swellings, and such swellings nearly always afflicted corners, rounding them out as if to suggest that nature hated right-angles. Nature's swellings couldn't be slit down the middle the way Father Lemuel's coc.o.o.n could, however, and their interiors weren't equipped with artificial nerve-nets with nearly as many connections as a human brain.

Stepping through the slit into the soft interior always made Sara feel claustrophobic for a moment or two, but the sensation was preferable to climbing into a gel-tank, which she had to do every time her smartsuit needed modification. Once the slit had sealed itself again there was a moment when the world seemed to turn upside-down, as the pull of actual gravity was cus.h.i.+oned and replaced by the apparent gravity of a virtual world. Once the moment of transition was over, however, she was fully committed to the Fantasyworld, and it only took a minute or so for her to enter into the illusion wholeheartedly.

The dragon she had come to ride was at least sixty metres from head to tail, but that was partly because it had such a long tail and a long neck. Its body wasn't that much bigger than a robocab, if you didn't count the enormous wings and the huge clawed feet.

Sara had been half-expecting four legs as well as the wings, and a body more like a lion's than a chicken's, but this was a world she had never looked into through her bedroom window. She was delighted to see that the colors were exactly right; the dragon's scales were gold and silver-mostly gold on the back, but all pure silver on the belly-except for the hood behind its snaky head, which was intricately patterned in red and orange.

Sara had elected to ride the dragon rather than be the dragon, so she found herself perched-precariously, it seemed-on a little saddle at the base of the neck. She had stirrups for her feet, and improbably long reins to hold on to, but it wasn't easy to believe that any signal she sent to the creature's distant head would actually elicit a response.

It was even harder to believe it once the long neck and coiled around so that the dragon could look back at her with its huge snaky green eyes, flickering its tongue as if it thought she might make a tasty meal, small enough to take at a single gulp.

The dragon didn't say anything. She could have chosen a Fantasyworld in which dragons could and did talk, but that seemed like cheating. She wanted to fly with dragons that were just dragons, not pseudopeople in fancy costumes. The kind of dragon on which she was mounted was no more real than the other kind, of course, but it seemed somehow to be a little less contrived, a little less fake.

The dragon must have looked around to check that she was aboard and properly posed, because it only favored her with a single lofty glance of disdain before it turned back again to look down the precipitous slope of the mountain on whose pinnacle it was perched, and then up at the clear blue sky. Without further delay, it launched itself into the air.

Sara couldn't help breathing in sharply. This was where the temporary IT was supposed to kick in, to work from inside her body to empower the illusion. For a moment, her mind clung hard to the knowledge that this was only a manufactured dream, and that she was still in the hometree, in Father Lemuel's room-but then it relaxed. She wasn't taken over in any kind of scary way; she just relaxed into the experience. She allowed her disbelief to be suspended; she gave her consent to the fantasy.

And it did feel as if she were actually moving, with the airstream flowing past her increasing to a gale as the dragon picked up speed. When she looked down, it really did seem that the ground was far below, and that she really might fall if she leaned too far to one side or the other.

She knew that if she tried to do anything the Environmental Rules wouldn't permit, she really would "fall" out of the saddle. She wouldn't be hurt when she hit the "ground," and her own IT wouldn't allow the IT that Father Lemuel had injected to scare her to death on the way down, but she had asked for a more realistic adventure and that was what she was going to get. The thrill of fear that lanced through her was as sharp as the thrill of fear she'd felt when she realized that she really might fall out of the hometree's crown and hurt herself when she hit the ground. Compared with floating around the insipid and intangible corridors of her virtual school, flying through the thick, cool atmosphere of the Fantasyworld was vivid, penetrating and wildly exhilarating.

This, Sara thought, must be what Father Aubrey meant when he talked about "the speed trip."

The dragon didn't beat its wings; it merely spread them out, arching and tilting them to catch an updraft that surged up the side of the mountain. It settled into a glide almost immediately, and then began to turn in a lazy circle around the pinnacle, soaring higher on the ascending column of air.

Sara felt the rush of the wind in her hair and on her face, crisp and electric, but she felt quite stable in the saddle-if not quite safe safe, at least not unduly uncomfortable. She wasn't in any hurry to look down again, though. She looked up, into the bright blue sky, squinting against the sunlight, and she looked out at the jagged horizon, where range after range of snow-capped mountains extended as if forever.

She had read the program's supplementary literature carefully, even though she didn't quite understand everything that it contained. She wanted to savor the imaginary world to the full, so she had ploughed on determinedly, even through the technical jargon. If this world had been an actual planet rather than an image in the mind's eye of a machine, it would have been twice the size of Earth, with only a fifth of its surface covered by water-a mult.i.tude of lakes rather than a patchwork of oceans-and almost all the remainder crumpled like a rucked-up rug. Many of the peaks would have been worn down by erosion, their rough slopes gentled as if by millions of years of rainstorms and floods of melting snow. The program that was generating the world had grinding tectonic plates built into its binary bedrock, and new peaks would be thrusting up as the older ones were worn down.

Sara knew that the "world" had only existed for a hundred years or so, and that its actual evolution had been incredibly rapid-but within its world-soul it had an implicit existence that stretched billions of years into the past, and an a.s.sumption of evolution with all the patience necessary to bring dragons out of reptiles that had once been fish, which had once been wormlike invertebrates...and so on, all the way back to bacterial slime.

The world felt old. Sara was not quite sure whether that sensation was somehow being communicated to her by the nan.o.bots, or whether it was something her own imagination was inventing-but either way, she was glad of it.

The dragon, on the other hand, did not seem old at all. For all its vast size and easy competence in the air, there was something youthful about it-or perhaps, Sara thought, she was only projecting her own youth upon it. And why not? She was here to enjoy herself, to be master of her own experience.

She drew slightly on the reins, trying to suggest to the dragon that they had circled the peak for long enough, and that it was time to undertake a more ambitious directional flight.

The dragon responded to her touch. It turned its back on the high-set sun, and straightened out its course, heading for a group of peaks so tall that they wore collars of cloud.

Now, Sara looked down into the valleys over which they pa.s.sed, at forests and meadowlands, winding rivers and waterfalls, placid lakes. There was no sign of human habitation but there were other animals: great herds of s.h.a.ggy herbivores making their way along their grazing trails.

If Sara had chosen to be a dragon she could have hunted as one, trying to pick off an infant herbivore, but dragons of this sort did not hunt with riders on their back. Sara wasn't sorry about that, nor did she resolve to return one day in a fas.h.i.+on that would let her use her simulated talons and fangs to kill, and her simulated mouth to swallow her prey. She only wanted to fly. She was not here to pretend that dragons really lived, but only that they flew. What the dragon symbolized was more important to her than its seeming scaliness and fles.h.i.+ness, even though she had only the vaguest notion of what it did symbolize, for her or for anyone.

Oddly enough, although the dragon seemed to be flying half a kilometer above the ground-more as it pa.s.sed over the deep-set valleys-she did not have as acute a sense of height as she had had when she had finally paused in the hometree's steeple-like crown. At first she thought that was because the new Internal Technology wasn't living up to its promises, but there was another factor involved.

In the hometree's crown she had felt as if she were still connected to the ground. The potential fall had been measurable against a solid vertical scale. Here, there was nothing between her and the ground but empty s.p.a.ce, which had no sensible scale. The perceptible objects on the ground seemed very small, and she knew that their seeming smallness was a product of distance, but her kind of eyes could not make that distance meaningful-except when they flew close to a vertical slope, whose precipitousness would become abruptly obvious as her mind somehow changed gear. That never lasted for long, though; the dragon flew on and on, leaving all such tilted walls behind.

The special Internal Technology continued its efforts, but now that she had become accustomed to its effects she became increasingly aware of the differences between the sensations of "touch" it synthesized and the real thing. The texture of the Fantasyworld wasn't quite right. The saddle and harness she was holding, and the scaly skin she could reach out and stroke, certainly seemed to be there there, but they lacked the subtleties of real-world solidity. The air caressing her face as she moved through it was more convincing, but Sara couldn't shake off the suspicion that it wouldn't have convinced Father Aubrey, or anyone else who knew what a real speed trip was like.

Even so, it was new. It was wonderful. It was worth the effort.

As the flight extended, Sara tried to imagine what she might look like from a viewpoint even higher in the sky, from which the flying dragon might appear to be skimming the surface below, like a fiery cross moving across an infinite field of grey and green, flattened out by perspective. Was that, she wondered, what one of Frank Warburton's tattooed dragons had looked like? Had they looked as if they were soaring over a body that was in fact a world?

No, she decided. The dragon in the shop window had been seen in profile, as if from an airs.h.i.+p floating alongside it, as if the skin of the wearer were the sky and not the ground at all: an infinite absence rather than an immediate presence. Was that the impression his clients had been trying to achieve? Not magnification, but transformation?

She began to see other dragons now, some soaring around their domestic peaks, others perched on ledges close to nests where huge white eggs were resting. Were they near to hatching? There was no way to tell. Half a dozen smaller dragons fluttered upwards to fly alongside Sara's mount in brief formation, but none carried a rider, and none turned its great green eye to stare at her. She was not invisible, but she was not of interest. She was an alien visitor, but her presence was not so disruptive that she needed to be noticed, let alone feared.

There are thousands of Fantasy worlds like this one, Sara thought, and there'll be millions more-more than anyone could ever explore, even in a lifetime like mine.

CHAPTER VIII.

Sara began to feel cold, and realized that her temporary IT was already preparing her for the end of her trip. In advance of being expelled, she would be slightly discomfited, so that she would not regret her return to her own reality and might even feel glad to be home and warm. The awareness that time was short made her concentrate harder, determined to make the most of the experience while it lasted. She stroked the dragon's scales with her left hand, feeling their peculiar quality, like adamantine silk. She looked from side to side at the huge wings, marveling at the elegance of their curvature, the awesome precision of their form. She looked back at the extending tail, undulating ever so slightly like an eel in shallow water, then forward at the stretching neck, the arched hood, the strangely tinted head.

She looked up into the blue vault of the imaginary heavens, leaning back to let the sun's radiance warm her swirling hair as if it were a halo. Then she looked down again at the valleys sweeping by, nourished by streams whose sources were snow-packed crevices, weeping as the sun's glow eased their excess without ever cutting through the tresses dangling from the icy summits. She looked at the clouds cl.u.s.tered about the highest peaks, hugging them tightly, stirred at their outer edges by breezes that were not nearly strong enough to dislodge their grip and send them tumbling across the sky.

For the first time in her life, Sara was struck by the sensation that this particular virtual world was actually more real more real than the actual one. She was old enough to know that the sensation was subjective, arising as much from the particular way she was than the actual one. She was old enough to know that the sensation was subjective, arising as much from the particular way she was paying attention paying attention as the cleverness of Father Lemuel's coc.o.o.n and the temporary IT, but did make her wonder why she never attended to her actual surroundings with as much intensity...and the answer, she realized, was that her actual surroundings were too familiar, that she had no choice but to take them for granted because that was the essence of her relations.h.i.+p with them. This was different; it had a dramatic quality that actuality could only produce in circ.u.mstances so extreme as to be terrifying. Only a virtual world could offer this special kind of vividness without anything but the most superficial, graceful and entertaining sense of threat. This was a purer kind of excitement than any available outside a coc.o.o.n. as the cleverness of Father Lemuel's coc.o.o.n and the temporary IT, but did make her wonder why she never attended to her actual surroundings with as much intensity...and the answer, she realized, was that her actual surroundings were too familiar, that she had no choice but to take them for granted because that was the essence of her relations.h.i.+p with them. This was different; it had a dramatic quality that actuality could only produce in circ.u.mstances so extreme as to be terrifying. Only a virtual world could offer this special kind of vividness without anything but the most superficial, graceful and entertaining sense of threat. This was a purer kind of excitement than any available outside a coc.o.o.n.

Was that, she wondered, why people like Father Lemuel found themselves spending more and more time in virtual worlds, less and less in the real one. And what kind of virtual worlds did Father Lemuel live in, anyhow? Did he also ride dragons, or did he have better things to do?

It was, of course, impossible to ask. She was old enough now to know where the most significant taboos of adult life were set out, and to steer well clear of any violation.

Then the dragon began to descend again. It was, she had to suppose, a long way from home-much further than she was. Perhaps it would pick up another rider before it set off on the journey-or perhaps, for now, it had earned a rest.

"How was it?" Father Lemuel asked, when Sara emerged from the coc.o.o.n, stumbling as she readjusted to the drag of actual gravity.

"It was great," she said, trying hard to sound suitably enthusiastic, so that Father Lemuel would think that his money had been well-spent. Actually, she felt dazed and disconcerted, not yet ready to evaluate the experience accurately.

Father Lemuel nodded, understandingly. "But not so very much different from watching them through a picture window?" he suggested. "Not quite as gripping as climbing the hometree."

Sara looked up at her oldest father with a slight frown, but she didn't say anything. She wondered exactly how good he was at following the train of her thought.

"It was was different," she a.s.sured him. "The new IT made it feel much more real." different," she a.s.sured him. "The new IT made it feel much more real."

"It's new to you," Father Lemuel observed, implying that it was far from new to him. "You'll get used to it." Obviously, her parents-one of them, at least-were not as innocent in the ways of "entertainment IT" as Sara had a.s.sumed.

"If you get used to it...," she began, before the suspicion that she might be asking a forbidden question made her pause.

Father Lemuel didn't seem to mind the personal nature of the implicit enquiry. "Why do I spend so much of my time in virtual worlds, if the experience is always inferior?" he finished for her. "Some people argue that it ought not to be reckoned inferior just because it's different, but that isn't really the point. All VW addicts point out there's an awful lot you can do in the virtual world that you wouldn't attempt to do in the real world because it would be too dangerous-but that isn't really the point either. You already understand that the real purpose of synthesized experience is to open up opportunities that have no parallel in the real world. Dragonriding is only the first step. In a VW you can reduce yourself to the size of an insect or a bacterium, ride a s.p.a.cecraft through the solar system and beyond, etcetera, etcetera...and you can visit hypothetical worlds very different from ours, where everything-including the laws of physics-has been altered, not according to anyone's constructive imagination but by manipulating the generative code. Do you understand what I mean by the generative code?"

"I think so," Sara said. "At bottom, everything in a machine is just a matter of switches being on or off. What you see in a window or a coc.o.o.n is a translation of a long string of ones and noughts."

"That's right. A lot of what you see on your desktop screen or through a window starts out as a picture, which is converted into generative code so that it can be reproduced-and the picture can then be made to move by means of an animating program. But you don't have to start with the picture. You can use code to generate imagery that no one has ever seen or imagined before: whole virtual universes, which can then be explored at the sensory level. Do you see what I mean?"

"And that's what you do all day-explore imaginary universes?"

"I used to, when I was working full-time. I wrote code to generate alien virtual environments from scratch, then checked them out, to see whether any of them were interesting. In those days, I was looking for commercial exploitability. It's how I made my money. Nowadays, it's more of a...well, I suppose Steve would call it a hobby, because that's what I'd call his junk-collecting. I'd probably call it a vocation, because that sounds much more serious. Not that I turn down the opportunity to earn more credit if I find something I can sell. Dragons were never my sort of thing, though. Somebody else collected the royalties on your little trip."

"I like dragons," Sara said, defensively.

"So I've noticed," Father Lemuel replied-although, so far as Sara knew, he had never actually come into her room to see the models on her shelves or look through her picture window. "It's okay to like dragons. The reason I started telling you all that was to explain why you can only go so far with dragons-or any other conventional invention of the imagination. Your own senses-touch as well as sight-have been shaped by millions of years of evolution to deal with the world you walk around in. Even virtual worlds that mimic the actual world as closely as possible can only reproduce an appearance, and your brain is never completely fooled by it. My coc.o.o.n is state-of-the-art, but state-of-the-art will never quite catch up with the texture of actuality, even with the aid of clever IT. You'll never get an adrenalin rush from climbing in a coc.o.o.n that's the same as the one you got from climbing the hometree, because your brain and your body will always know the difference. There are some kinds of experience where it makes very little difference-including school, playing games and chatting to your friends-but whenever an experience is really important to you, or whenever you want an experience to be really important, you'll be aware of that margin. That's why so-called VW addicts never really lose touch with reality. Reality is the only place you can get the whole whole sensation of touch." sensation of touch."

Sara thought about that for a few moments before saying, "I really did enjoy it."