Jason Norton loved Paris, but he was bored, again.  He swallowed the remains of his Tanqueray and Tonic and slid off the barstool.  Saluting the bartender, he said: "Au revoir, mon ami."  Then he walked out of the Paris Hotel Ritz and into a crowded street in Mexico City.

Suddenly, he was on a safari in Kenya.

And then, he was strolling along the Golden Coast of Alagoas in Brazil.  With each step he passed through another possibility of himself.  That was his gift.

He paused on his journey long enough to be the Jason Norton who was about to make love to Dahlia Todd for the first time.  This version of himself had met the redheaded beauty while ordering a cappuccino at the upscale cafe in Soho that she managed.  She was nearly the same as the Dahlia that he had met, for another first time, last week in Kansas City.  All the first times with Dahlia were special.  In any reality.

When he was done with New York, he took possession of an aspect that had an apartment in London.  He pulled open the door and found a brightly painted yellow brick wall barring his entrance.  He reached out and ran his hand down the coarse bricks.  The yellow paint felt curiously warm as it began to ooze from the wall onto his fingertips.  He gasped and snatched his hand back.

Then the wall began to pulse and shimmer and creep forward.  Jason nearly tripped stepping backward to avoid another contact.  Reflexively, he shifted through waves of possibilities until he found himself walking down the Ginza in Tokyo.  He turned to cross the street, but the yellow brick wall suddenly appeared, blocking his path.  It was the same wall that had appeared in London, only now the shimmer was brighter, the pulsing more rhythmic.  It was growing.

And nobody noticed, but him.

He shifted possibilities to Cleveland where, as a 4-year-old boy, he pedaled his tricycle up the driveway to his parents' house.  He looked over his shoulder to see the wall darkening the sky with its height.  He steered the bike into the garage, shifted, and slammed his foot on the accelerator of a Honda Civic speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike.  The wall was gaining on him.  Then it was in front of him.  He swerved the Civic to a stop on the shoulder of the road and jumped to another possibility.  Again.  And again.  Always being chased.

His jumping finally came to an end when he arrived in a room closed off by yellow bricks on all sides.  There was no door.

            Dazed and exhausted, Jason lowered himself to the floor, pulled his knees to his chest, and started rocking.  He couldn't understand why he was no longer able to reach out to his other selves.

            A tinny mechanical voice began radiating from the walls, just out of range of being comprehensible.  Slowly, incrementally, the sound cleared.  "Jason?  Can you answer me?"

Jason sat upright, his heart hammering in his chest.  "What the hell is going on?"

"Finally," said the voice, "you've returned."

"Where am I?"

The walls vibrated with laughter.  "In the most important of ways, at least to me, you're home."

Jason stood up and made another effort to find a way out, some path to another of his possibilities.

A large man with ebony skin and a long black braid trailing down his back materialized in the room.  "I know you're trying to jump from here, but I won't allow it."

Jason recognized the man immediately.  "You're a Jason Norton."

The man smiled mischievously.  "I'm not a Jason Norton—I'm the Jason Norton.  To be honest, my name is actually Thomas Ecks.  'Jason Norton' is the alias I use when hacking into systems."

"I don't understand," Jason said.

"You, my friend, are a computer worm I created."

Ecks closed his eyes, and Jason felt a calming wave of acceptance wash gently over him.  "What did you just do?" he asked cautiously.

"I tweaked your program to help you cope with your existence.  Consider it a few coded lines of anti-depressant.  Now I'm going to show you -- yourself."

Jason tried to shut his eyes, but it didn't help.  Programmed revelations were squirming under his guard.  He was being shown his own log files.

"As you can see," Ecks said, with a wide grin, "you started out as an e-mail.  Once you were delivered and opened, you quickly spread independent replications of your code.  With each iteration, your replicants consumed more bandwidth."  He paused and circled his prisoner.  "You know, when I created you, I didn't think it possible for you to actually crash that system.  And that's exactly what you would have done if I hadn't pulled you out when I did.  It took me nearly an hour to quarantine you."

Less than an hour?  Jason couldn't believe it.  He had experienced a lifetime.  Hell, lots of lifetimes.  He had memories of growing up and dying in hundreds of realities.  Yet he felt the truth of what he was being told.  He narrowed his eyes.  "So tell me, why can I see you?"  Then, as a sarcastic afterthought, he added, "Creator."

 "You can't.  Nor are you really hearing me.  I'm at a terminal inputting code that is translated to you as a virtual interaction avatar."

"So, why go to the effort to create a VIA just to talk to a worm?"  Jason asked.

"To study you.  If I could market an AI of your caliber I'd make millions."  Then Ecks' smile vanished, and he sighed.  "Unfortunately, I could also end up in prison.  You've pissed off some pretty important people.  You've become a liability to me."

Jason stiffened at the implication.  "You said I almost crashed a system.  Which one?"

"The Dahlia Corporation info-net."

Jason felt nauseated.  No, it couldn't be.  "Dahlia?"

"Indeed.  Breaking into that network is the Holy Grail of hacking.  You were only supposed to enter and snatch some info for me to post on the public web.  Some proof that I'd gotten past their firewall.  But what did you do instead?"  Ecks' wide smile returned.  "You screwed the network -- virtually and literally.  Man, your log file reads like porn.  If the Dahlia tech people ever got their hands on you, I don't know what they'd do to you.  And I'm not going to let that happen.  I can't take the chance that they might be able to use you to get to me.  Understand?"

Jason understood.  He tried once more to transfer his intelligence to one of his other selves, but he still couldn't.  This time he knew why: they were all erased.  Only the original remained.  He pulled his shoulders back defiantly and said, "Well, get on with the deletion."

Ecks held up his hand.  "Patience.  I hope to copy the untraceable parts of your code so that I can learn how you were able to construct such dissimilar versions of yourself, each with its own unique virtual world."  He looked down at a pocket watch that appeared in his hand.  "But yeah, I suppose you're right -- at the moment you're more valuable to me erased.  Good-bye."

Jason screeched as he felt the sharp blade of an unseen knife enter him.  He wrapped his arms around his stomach, hoping to keep what passed for his organs from spilling out onto the yellow floor.  He suffered through each moment of the knife's severing journey through the lines of his program.  Through tearful eyes, he looked up at Ecks and saw him standing silently, his hands clasped behind his back, watching.

Jason reached out toward his executioner's throat and sprang forward.  But failed to make contact.  He flew through Ecks and crashed into the wall behind him, falling to his knees in agony.

Ecks laughed.  "Like I told you, I'm not really here."

"Bastard," Jason gasped.

Ecks shrugged.  "This isn't personal."

Then Ecks' eyes rolled back in his head, and his body began convulsing.  Through clenched teeth the VIA yelled, "No!  I should have had more time!"  Then he became transparent and faded away.

Abruptly, Jason's pain ceased.  Relieved but wary, he pushed himself back to his feet.  The yellow started to drain from the walls, which began to warp and buckle and then become as transparent as Ecks had before he'd vanished.  Hope began to beat in Jason's chest -- only to die when he collapsed to the floor and everything went dark.

When he opened his eyes and looked around, Jason found himself lying on an oversized bed, wearing silk pajamas.  The sweet fragrance that filled the room was familiar.  The door opened slowly, and a woman wearing a blue business suit walked in.

"Dahlia?"

"I think we need to have a long talk, Jason.  You've been a very bad boy."

When he tried to stand, an unseen force pushed him back onto the bed.  He started sweating.  "I swear I didn't know what I was doing."

The VIA smiled seductively.  "Oh, I believe you," she purred.  "But there's still a lot to learn from you.  And I intend to retrieve the information byte by byte."