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     Skyler naturally attracted the unpleasant and grotesque so, of course, he was the one that found it. Link walked up the rotting wooden stairs to Skyler's apartment, opened the door, and found Skyler waiting for him by the kitchen table. The first thing Link noticed was Skyler's strained smile. Then he saw what was on the kitchen table. It was a severed hand.
     Skyler looked flushed and excited, and he kept constantly running his pale thin fingers through his dark shoulder-length hair.
     "Link, you gotta come here and look at this," he said. His bare foot tapped the hardwood floor impatiently.
     Link walked across the living room, weaving his way through, and over, all of Skyler's clay and plaster sculptures, each in a different stage of completion, toward the table that took up most of the space in the kitchen at the other end of the small one bedroom apartment. Most of the clay sculptures were unfired, and some had cracked when the clay had been allowed to dry too quickly. One looked like a sick dog that had been slightly melted, and another was a half-size woman who was eating her own hand by cramming it into her mouth as far as possible. A mobile that strongly resembled a deformed bird hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. The sunlight that filtered through the dirty and streaked front window gave all of the sculptures an angular quality. Of course, none of them were finished. Link couldn't remember the last time Skyler had actually finished anything.
     Link stopped at the table's edge. In the middle of the table was a right hand on its back with the fingers curled up like a dead bug's legs. There was a small pool of thick clear fluid next to the stump, but no blood, and the flesh was the white color of a fish's underbelly. The surface of the stump was completely flat, providing a cross-sectional view of bone, muscle, and connective tissue.
     It made Link feel intensely uncomfortable. "My God, where...where did you get this?" he asked.
     "I found it on the floor this morning," Skyler said. He shrugged. "It was just lying there halfway underneath the end of the sofa."
     Link glanced at the brown threadbare sofa against the far living room wall where he slept every night. Its arms were covered with dried smudges of clay, left by Skyler's careless hands, and it gave the impression that it was rotting from within. "Yeah, right."
     "It was!" Skyler protested. "That's not all." He flipped the hand over.
     "Christ, don't touch it." Link winced involuntarily. "Use a towel or something."
     Skyler grinned at Link's discomfort. "Check this out." He spread the fingers.
     There was a small scar between the index and middle finger.
     "Jesus Christ." It's a copy of my right hand, thought Link. A fucking copy of my right hand. He swallowed.
     Skyler looked at him expectantly. "I was right, wasn't I? Look at the scar."
     Link didn't answer. His chest tightened, until he found it difficult to breathe. Had this thing been right next to him the entire time he was sleeping?
     "Push it--" Link cleared his throat. "Push it flat."
     Skyler pushed on the center of the hand, and despite its stiffness, he managed to get it reasonably flat. Link placed his right hand next to it.
     It was a perfect copy.
     It was identical, right down to the patterns of the blue veins, the light blond hair below the knuckles, and the outlines of the tendons. The nails were even bitten to the quick, like Link's nails. He yanked his hand off the table and thought, who would bite the nails of a severed hand? He had a momentary image of a duplicate of himself, running around without a hand, and screaming at the top of his lungs.
     Link shook his head. "Coincidence..." His voice sounded weak and unconvinced, even to him. Especially to him.
     "It's your hand, Link."
     He looked at Skyler. "If this is a joke...one of your sculptures..."
     "It's not."

     Link sat at the table and tried to tell himself that Skyler had somehow covertly photographed his hand, and then made a sculpture of it, just to scare him. Could Skyler have made a mold of it when he was sleeping? To actually consider where else it could have come from was totally beyond him. All he could do was look at the hand. He'd try to look away, but his eyes would come right back to it. He wanted to touch it the way that he always wanted to pick at a scab, but he just couldn't bring himself to do it. Not yet, at least.
     The hand's appearance had a completely different affect on Skyler. While Link was paralyzed, Skyler could barely contain himself, like a kid with a new toy. In the background, Link was distantly aware of the mumble of Skyler's frantic phone conversations, and the sliding sounds as Skyler scurried around him, moving his sculptures to new positions in the room.
     When Link finally did look away from the hand, he saw that Skyler was carefully sliding his oldest sculpture out of his room as it rested on a piece of cardboard. It was a twisted mass of fiberglass squares that had been soaked in epoxy resin and allowed to harden. The fiberglass mass was now about the size of a bean bag chair and it would occasionally grow whenever Skyler decided that "it needed just a little more." Link privately thought that if Skyler managed to live long enough the ball would eventually swell to encompass the entire apartment swallowing the sofa, tables, and the other sculptures. Skyler had changed into his favorite T-shirt and loose baggy pants that hung around his ridiculously thin legs like partially deflated cotton balloons. The T-shirt had a faded picture of Albert Einstein on it. Albert always looked kind of sad to Link.
     "They're coming over," Skyler called out.
     "What?"
     "Raphael and the gang from the gallery are coming over to see the hand."
     Link could see that in typical Skyler fashion, he was going to use his hand to score points with the art gallery gang.
     "Wait a minute. Before we show this to anybody don't we have to...well you know..." Link waved his arms, "call somebody about this. The cops or something?"
     "About a hand? Are you kidding?" Skyler was incredulous. "What would we tell them? It's your hand, after all."
     "Are you going to tell the people from the gallery that it's really a hand, or are you going to try to pass this off as some kind of sculpture you have done?"
     Skyler smiled slyly. "I think that I won't really say anything...I'll let them draw their own conclusions."
     Link frowned.
     "After all," Skyler said, "we don't actually know it's real. I just found it."The thought of other people looking and poking at the hand made Link feel strangely vulnerable. "Well, what if I just don't want to show this to anyone?"
     An annoyed look crossed Skyler's face. "Look, I already called and promised them they could see this thing. What am I going to do now? Call and tell them they can't see it? Come on."
     "Well, you should have asked me." Link couldn't really object too much. After all, he had been staying in Skyler's apartment for some time because his job as a test subject paid so poorly that he couldn't afford a place of his own, and he had nowhere else to go. He looked over at the sagging sofa that had been his bed for the last four months. Ever since he had moved out of the apartment he had shared with Jennifer two and a half years ago he had drifted from one temporary residence to another, each a way station, but now it occurred to Link that all of those places were really part of the same long downward slide that had ended at Skyler's sofa. What if I left? Link wondered. Would Skyler let him take the hand with him?
     Skyler went into his bedroom and returned with his marijuana pipe. "Man, I just gotta see this thing stoned." He sat at the table again, and lit up. He inhaled deeply, and held it the way he always did, with his cheeks slightly puffed out for no real reason.
     Link flashed an irritated look at Skyler. For the millionth time : "Do you realize what an asshole you look like when you do that?"
     Skyler exhaled into his face on cue. "Yup."

     Skyler's friends began to arrive, and the dark and cramped apartment quickly filled with people and smoke. Link was still dazed by the hand's appearance, so he retreated to the sofa, and let Skyler run things. Occasionally, through the crowd, he got a glimpse of Skyler's head, perched on his painfully thin neck, as he ushered people around.
     The ritual was always the same. Someone would enter and then Skyler would call out to them. He wouldn't actually go to the door, because that would take him away from the hand, and the center of attention. The newcomer would go to the hand, and then they would come to Link with their inane comments, and expressions that indicated attraction and revulsion in equal parts.
     God, I hate these people, Link thought. He never could seem to put enough distance between himself and everyone else while confined to the interior of the small dilapidated apartment, especially with Skyler's half-finished shit everywhere.
     Skyler had insisted that Link couldn't leave, because that would eliminate the circus freak show appeal of the whole event. That's what he began calling it : the event. Jesus. After all, if you can't compare the severed hand to the original, it's just like any other severed hand, Skyler argued. Like that wouldn't be strange enough.
     Hur-ry, Hur-ry, Hur-ry, step right up. See the amazing hand! Come one, come all!
     Link wanted to leave anyway. He stayed. He couldn't shut Skyler down because they were friends, and because he knew how Skyler felt as Skyler stared at his shit apartment and unfinished projects. He'd felt the same way. Link knew what it meant to be nothing and to want to be something; so he stayed.
     An eternity had passed for Link by the time the big shots showed up, a guy and two women. Fashionably late, of course. Maybe one of them runs the damn gallery, Link thought. He didn't know or care, but they must have been someone because Skyler left the hand behind, and he wriggled through the crowd with his broken-hanger shoulders leading the way for his scarecrow body to meet them. He waved Link over urgently.
     "This is him! This is the guy I told you about." Skyler practically sang.
     Only the man looked at Link's face. The two women looked at what he was wearing, a faded green shirt and blue jeans.
     The three of them were dressed in black, head to toe. Of course.
     Skyler turned to Link. "Link, this is Raphael. He runs the art gallery on Highland Avenue...you know the one." He didn't introduce the women. But then, why would he? They were mere members of the entourage.
     Link nodded, unsure of exactly what to say.
     Raphael cleared his throat. "Well, Link, what do you do when you're not having copies of your hand made?"
     "He's a test subject down at SolipSystems," Skyler answered before Link could speak.
     Link gave him an annoyed look. He couldn't stand it when Skyler was so fucking eager to please.
     "A lab rat?" The woman on the left of Raphael asked, and laughed.
     The corner of Raphael's mouth twitched. "Yes...tell us, Link. What is it like to be a lab rat?" he asked in a voice slightly louder than necessary.
     Link's face grew hot. There was silence as they waited for him to speak, and he became acutely aware of the press of the people around him, listening to the conversation.
     "I work in the physics program," he said, at last. "I'm a paid test subject in a quantum mechanics experiment."
     "Quantum mechanics?" Raphael echoed hollowly. He had lost his smile.
     Gaining momentum, Link continued, "Actually, the experiment has to do the theories of an ancient Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elea." Now it was his turn to smile. "You know about him, of course."
     "Certainly," Raphael said in a voice that was anything but certain.
     Link could see that Raphael sensed that he had lost control of the conversation, but that he wasn't sure how. He decided to twist the knife even more.
     "Remember how Zeno used reductio ad absurdum arguments to 'prove' all sorts of things like, motion is impossible, and watched pots never boil? It turns out that at the quantum level, he was right. If you watch an atom closely enough, you can prevent it from changing state. For instance, if a nuclear bomb were watched intently enough, it couldn't explode." Link shrugged. "But of course, the largest number of atoms you could ever monitor closely enough for something like that at one time physically is about five thousand, so all of the experiments are done with computer models where they can monitor a larger number of the particles at once, but then, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know."
     Raphael glared at Link murderously.
     Skyler stepped in front of Link. "Hey, did you see the hand?" He smiled winningly, playing his trump card.
     They all drifted away, leaving Link alone in the middle of the room.
     After that he wouldn't talk to anyone. Occasionally somebody would ask him to see his hand, or the hand, and he showed them, but that was it.
     As yet another group of people approached Link after they had viewed the hand, he caught a brief glimpse of it, still on the table. The hand seemed so isolated and exposed, that he almost felt sorry for it. A thin man with a shock of white hair, and hands that moved in quick, jerky thrusts in time with the irregular rhythm of his voice examined it. They were all talking self-importantly. Talking about the philosophical ramifications of the hand, and what it all meant in the cosmic scheme of things. A dull ache grew in Link's chest.
     He started to drift back to other parties that he had attended in this apartment. Was the last one, or two years ago? he wondered. He thought about the last time that he told Jennifer that he loved her, and how everyone comes to a certain point where they know that if they continue to stay with someone, they will never be safe again. He thought about the punctured look on her face as he walked out on her.
     The tall woman next to him continued to babble, pontificating about how the hand challenged the "whole concept of self," to the point where her utterances were more fashion statements than real words, and he thought about the time that he had argued with Skyler about Nietzsche's Zarathustra : "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
     Most philosophy sounds like that, Link realized. It sounded so right when you first heard it, but as soon as you really thought about it, you realized that it was complete and utter bullshit. Some wounds were so deep that they never healed. Usually, they were made so subtly that you didn't even realize what had happened until you slipped in a pool of your own blood years later--but he didn't say it. He didn't interrupt. Instead, Link numbly stood and nodded at the right places, and he let all of them make their little points.
     One of the women seemed to find the whole thing erotic, and she kept coming on to Link. Her wide hips and meaty hands always seemed to be brushing some part of his body. Finally, she cornered him on the couch with her uncomfortable, artificial conversation while the whole time her little rodent eyes would constantly dart down to look at his right hand as if she expected that it might come off too. She told him she liked his short blond hair, his unremarkable brown eyes, and his nose that was just a little too large for its own good. Her clumsy passes struck Link as much more repulsive that the hand itself. She went on and on with her eyes glittering, as she stared at his hand. My God, Link thought, can't she just stop?
     He escaped her by claiming that he had to take a piss, and even then she tried to follow him. He tried to get a glass of water, but the faucet wasn't working again, so he had to settle for a cup of impossibly black coffee that someone had made with the last of the bottled water. Link wrapped his hand around the cup like a tourniquet and tried to stay the hell away from everyone.
     Then someone brought out an old camera, and suddenly people wanted to get their photographs with Link and the hand. Link found himself on the couch again, and soon the hand appeared on his lap. As the photos were taken he had this image of these people putting the picture in their wallets and showing it proudly later : "...Well this is my wife and my daughter, and this is me and this guy with his weird extra hand grabbing his crotch." Link started to feel angry.
     Finally, blinded by the flashbulbs, he was allowed to stumble away.
     He worked his way to a wall, and leaned on it for support. The smoke in the air was so thick that he was getting lightheaded, and he heard himself say, "My head is expanding."
     The guy next to Link answered, "No man, the universe."
     "What?" Link muttered in thick confusion.
     "The universe is expanding."
     That was when he left.

     Link went back down the wooden stairs. The sunlight and clean air felt so refreshing after being in that dark smoke-filled apartment. At the bottom of the stairs a boy, maybe eight years old, walked by pulling a red wagon with a crudely cut section of plywood resting loosely on top of it, acting as a cover. The boy stopped when he saw Link. He had a smooth and trusting face. It was the face of a person who had never been lied to.
     "Wanna buy a knife?" he asked Link.
     "Uh...knife," Link managed to stammer.
     "Yeah," the boy said, as he slid the plywood lid off the wagon.
     The inside was filled with knives of all possible shapes and sizes. Link picked out one that had, instead of a flat blade, a peculiarly triangular-shaped blade, with ridges running down both sides. Why would you want a blade that was so thick? he wondered.
     Link held the knife up to the boy, and he seemed to understand Link's question.
     "Yeah, it makes it harder for a stab wound to close--much greater chance of infection," the boy said. "Ten bucks."
     Link was so shaken that he turned away without a word. As he walked toward his car, he thought, Just what I need most--wounds that don't heal.
     He climbed into the car, put the key in the ignition, and shut the door behind him. His head was reeling, and it seemed far too difficult to actually consider driving anywhere, so he sat motionless. Link couldn't shake Raphael's cutting smile. It reminded him too much of the self-conscious embarrassment he still felt about working at the lab.
     Link remembered the day he pulled into the parking lot next to the SolipSystems test facility building for the first time; thinking to himself, Is this the best I can do? Is this the only way I can make any money? The outside of the building itself had struck him as little more than a glorified warehouse. The bored guard at the door had given Link a temporary security badge, and escorted him past the lobby.
     Inside it was even less impressive. Beyond a few desk cubicles, most of the warehouse was stripped back to the outer walls leaving a maze of wiring and pipes fully exposed. Two large pieces of equipment dominated the enclosed space. One was the simulation computer and interface controller, and the other was a huge air conditioner that kept all of the computer equipment at the optimum operating temperature.
     The rotund and balding Dr. Rutherford, the head of the simulation team, trotted over to greet him, the new test subject. They went into Rutherford's small office that was almost overflowing with all sorts of incomprehensible diagrams and printouts, and drank flat soft drinks, as he explained how Link would be placed in realtime contact with a computer simulated environment.
     Rutherford's enthusiasm was infectious. As Link listened to him, he became envious of how much Rutherford loved what he did, and the life in his ideas. Link was especially fascinated by the way Rutherford described the closely intertwined relationship between experiment and observer in quantum mechanics, and that how, as an observer of the simulated environment, Link would collapse the wave functions of the atoms; in effect, "cementing" them into a completely static array.
     With animated gestures, Rutherford described to Link how he hoped the experiment would show that, if the number of statically maintained atoms became macroscopic, the universe would tend to compensate for these pockets of imposed order by generating inertial ranger effects, small areas of sub-atomic particles with wildly unexpected quantum states.
     As Rutherford was talking, Link tried to imagine himself as one of the atoms that was being held in place by forces he couldn't understand, struggling against his own inertia to break free. It occurred to Link how much his life was like the existence of these experimental atoms; especially his life with Jennifer. He never understood why he had felt so confined by something he couldn't define, or how she made him feel that way with just one look. He was the perfect subject for this experiment, because he was already living their simulation.
     The blast of a car horn, and the screech of tires jerked Link back to attention. He started the car and pulled into the street. Link absolutely couldn't go back to the apartment. He was scheduled for another shift at SolipSystems in about two hours, and he considered going a little early, but he just couldn't do it. He couldn't face it.
     He decided to stop at a cafe and get something to eat, and to put some mileage between himself and severed hands, children with knives, Raphael's taunting, and his own shame. Link pushed the accelerator down and told himself that the faster he drove, the less he would feel.

     Link returned to the apartment in the morning, dead tired and starved. Everything had gone wrong. He had been forced to put in a double shift at the lab because three people had called in sick, and two had suddenly quit. To top it all off, the twenty-four hour coffee shop that the graveyard shift observers all went to for breakfast every day had been closed without explanation.
     Mercifully, everyone had left "the event". Skyler was sitting at the kitchen table, eyes down and tight-lipped. Link could tell Skyler was pissed. His stomach ached, and he opened the fridge to get a beer.
     "You left," Skyler said accusingly, breaking the slight tension in the room.
     "I just had to leave, okay? It was getting too weird for me," Link responded, matching Skyler's harsh tone. "So, what happened after I left?"
     "Someone vandalized my new clay sculpture."
     Skyler's "new" sculpture had been sitting off in a corner for four months. He had told Link it was supposed to be a woman, but Skyler had never really done anything but give it a general shape. Link went over and studied it carefully. Skyler was right. It looked bigger and more defined than Link remembered, as if someone had worked on it; improved it.
     "Do you know who did it?"
     "No," Skyler said miserably.
     "Well, I didn't see anybody fooling with it. For all I know, the hand could have crawled over here on its own and worked on it." Link opened the beer, and took a long drink. It was so cold going down, his throat almost ached. "Say," he glanced around, "where is the hand anyway?"
     "I had to put it in the freezer. Right after everyone left, it started to give off this stench that was really unbelievable."
     Link walked to the freezer, and opened it. The smell of rotting meat still lingered. The hand was the only thing in it, and it was wrapped in clear plastic that was stiff as he unfolded it. The little finger was missing. It looked like it had been neatly snipped right off. Link felt violated. His stomach churned.
     "Skyler, what happened to the finger?" he demanded. "It was one of your stupid fuck friends, wasn't it? They just had to have a souvenir." Link put the hand back into the freezer, and he slammed the door shut.
     Skyler looked down sheepishly. "Well...actually, the finger was lost sometime during the party, and we never found it."
     "You mean there's a loose finger around the apartment?" This appalled Link even more. He was furious with Skyler. His stomach gyrated again, and he staggered into the bathroom, and stood over the toilet. Something came up and caught in his throat. Link started to choke and gasp for air, and then he threw up explosively.
     When Link was finished, he looked down in the toilet and saw something bobbing in the vomitus. He knew what it was immediately with a preternatural clarity that left him cold, and he threw up again. Link had spent many hours staring at one when he was a boy, fascinated by its otherworldly appearance as it lazily floated in a jar of preservative fluid. It was an appendix. Maybe his appendix.
     "Are you okay?" Skyler was behind him now. "What the hell is that?"
     Link couldn't answer. He was horrified. The acrid smell almost made him throw up for a third time.
     "Here," Skyler moved forward, "let me fish it out."
     "No!" It was an appendix.
     "Link, you can't just throw up something that big and then ignore it," he protested.
     "I......think it's the appendix that I had removed."
     For once, Skyler had nothing to say. He stared down at it again. "It could be, I guess," he conceded. "It's almost like it was trying to get back into you, and it just missed the right spot." he said, shaking his head in wonder.
     Suddenly, Skyler brightened. "Hey, this is even bigger than the hand."
     That was it. "Jesus Christ, doesn't anything bother you?" He flushed the toilet.
     "Hey!" Skyler protested. For a second, Link thought he was actually going to try to reach in after it, before it disappeared. "You should have saved it!"
     Link forced his way past Skyler out of the bathroom, pushing him harder than was necessary. "Why? What the hell for? So you can have all of your friends over again? Why stop there, Skyler? Why not just tape the appendix in the place of the missing finger? Then you can gross everyone out with one mutant art exhibit." Link shook his head. "Absolutely not. The show ends right here."
     Skyler stepped back uncertainly. "Yeah, you're right," he mumbled. "I'm sorry. It's just...shit like this just doesn't happen. Maybe you should see a doctor."
     "Just what do you propose that I am going tell this doctor...that I have this unfortunate tendency to barf up body parts that were removed years ago?"
     Skyler started to pace the room. "Look...it's crazy to think that this thing was actually an appendix," he said, raising his arm toward Link. "It could have been something you ate."
     Link shook his head. "I haven't eaten anything solid in more than twelve hours. Everything should have been digested already."
     "Okay, what if--" Skyler stopped pacing. "Oh God, what if you've got some kind of radiation poisoning from working at that lab?" His face was pale.
     Link felt a pang of anxiety. "Radiation wouldn't explain the hand though," he pointed out defensively.
     "I know it's an unpleasant possibility, but you have to face it. What if the hand and the appendix aren't related? The hand could have come from anywhere, but not that appendix. There's no way--"
     "It's not radiation, okay? So just drop it!" Link shouted.
     "Well, aren't you even going to call them, just to make sure?" Skyler asked with disbelief.
     Link walked over to the sofa, sat down, and tried to calm himself. Skyler couldn't be right. If there had been an accident, he would have been informed, Link told himself. He started to doubt his previous certainty. Was it an appendix? "I don't think so."
     Link expected Skyler to argue, but he just turned and walked away in disgust, retreating to his room. Skyler stopped at his door, and with his back still to Link said, "Link, you have been trying to kill yourself by jumping off two-story buildings since the day I met you, and you're doing it again. It just may be that this time, you have finally found a taller one."
     Skyler entered his room and closed the door.
     Link spent the rest of the day lying on the sofa, with its stale smell of mildew and dust penetrating his nose, until he couldn't smell anything else. Most of the nausea had subsided, but he still felt too weak to do much. He tried to sleep, but instead he found himself nervously scanning the dirty floor, looking for the missing finger. He picked up the phone several times, but he didn't call. He couldn't sleep until well after sundown.

     A stabbing pain in Link's right hand awakened him halfway through the night. He had the time to consider several horrifying possibilities, as he fumbled for the light switch. The skin of his little finger was almost black. Link touched it cautiously, and the black covering flaked off revealing new tender skin, red and angry, underneath. He held it away with his arm straight out, as if he could just get it far enough away from himself, it would be possible to deny it had happened. Breathing heavily, Link got up and went to the freezer, and pulled the hand out. The little finger was still gone, and now its middle and ring fingers were missing as well. A wave of vertigo swept though him and the hand slipped out of his grasp, and dropped onto the floor.
     Another shot of pain in his abdomen doubled Link over, and he cried out. He lifted his shirt up just in time to see his appendectomy scar fade away.

     Link sat on the floor at five-thirty in the morning with a phone book and a list of all of the other observers in the experiment that he could remember. He started calling. Skyler hovered around the room, pretending to be contemplating the beginning of a new sculpture, but he would stop moving whenever Link dialed a new number. There was no answer at the first eleven numbers. After each of Link's unsuccessful attempts, Skyler would look a little more uncertain; a little more haunted. On the twelfth attempt, someone picked of the phone.
     "Hello?" Link said.
     Skyler now completely abandoned his pose of starting a sculpture, and came up next to Link. "Hey, ask them if they--"
     "Would you shut up?" Link cut him off, holding his hand over the phone.
     The woman wouldn't do anything but cry. After ten minutes of trying to coax her, Link hung up.
     Skyler was now sitting on the sofa, rocking back and forth with his arms hugging his body. "Oh man, you're fucked. Completely fucked."

     It had been almost three days since they shut the experiment down; at least Link thought it had been three days. It had become increasingly difficult for him to judge the passage of time, now that Skyler was gone. He had stayed with Link for the first day and a half, checking in on him occasionally, but then Skyler had left him alone in his apartment without warning, and Link didn't expect that he would return until it was completely over. I've finally found something too much for even him, Link thought. He didn't blame Skyler. Not really.
     The sculpture of the woman had continued to change and evolve, becoming more detailed. It wasn't finished changing quite yet, but Link had realized some time ago that it was a sculpture of Jennifer, complete with slit wrists. Link moved the sculpture so that he could see it through the doorway of Skyler's room, as he lay in his bed. Link was interested to see if she would actually come to life, and he wondered if she would forgive him when she did.
     Before Skyler left, Link had him drive past SolipSystems. The parking lot was deserted except for three unmarked black vans with government license plates. Link believed that they had come to try to round up the observers, but he wasn't totally sure. Perhaps the fact that he had no address of his own had bought him some time while they searched for him. Link promised himself that they wouldn't find him. He didn't want to be just another piece of data in someone's research paper.
     There was some pain, but it wasn't really as bad as Link would have expected. He did have one particularly bad moment when his eyes were replaced. Without being able to see, his mind was free to imagine the worst. It had been a tremendous relief when his vision was restored.
     The substitutions did not occur at a constant rate. Several would take place almost simultaneously, followed by a period of inactivity. Sometimes it took several tries to successfully replace a particular part, like the appendix, but he was sure now that everything would be exchanged eventually. Often Link could prepare himself for the replacement of a specific body part because it would appear next to him first, and like the hand, it would disappear as the replacement was made. They would almost always appear before external parts were exchanged, and it would happen periodically for the internal organs as well. Link wondered if the other observers were all being replaced piecemeal like he was; being transformed.
     After the initial terror and fear became fatalism, Link thought about how Dr. Rutherford had said that it was the act of observing a system that forced the system to select one of its options, which then became real. Had he selected to be transformed?
     Was he being punished for violating some unknown law of nature, or of the heart? Had Rutherford underestimated the scope of the inertial ranger effect?
     Perhaps the universe would permit imposed order on the quantum scale, but when order was imposed on a macroscopic level, the universe responded with macroscopic change to maintain the symmetry. If the observers wouldn't permit the experimental matter to change, then the observers themselves would have to, in order to maintain the balance.
      Maybe, Link decided, it was something as simple as the fact that he was just tired of being so empty, and nature, above all else, abhorred a vacuum.

     Link looked at himself in the mirror above the bathroom sink. The new skin on his face had started to grow whiskers and his eyes were red and sunken; he had cried most of the night. He had been sitting up in bed to avoid irritating the tender new skin on his back when he'd felt it, and he was so overcome that he cried right there. Link didn't understand why he was crying just then, in the moment, as he lay in the dark of Skyler's room, but he did now. It was all so clear now. It was the first contact he'd had in years with what he remembered as himself, whole and healthy. Link had thought that these last few years had burned the ability to feel that way out of him. For that brief moment, the numbness had been lifted, and that was all it took to start him crying. Crying with release and relief. My God, he had felt whole and good again. Just for that second. It had given him a great deal of hope. Somewhere inside, the other half of him had survived all the crap he had done to himself. Maybe he didn't always have to be this bitter and vacant person that he'd become.
     Link opened the medicine cabinet and took out a can of shaving cream and a razor. As he spread the foam over his face he tried to recreate that feeling and aimed for it in his mind, to try to use it to overcome the inertia of his guilt and self-hatred, and direct his reconstruction.

     The complete change should come soon now. Link knew it with a feeling of certainty welling up inside him that was so powerful that he couldn't lose it and still feel like the same person. He supposed it was a little like love.

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