The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

Chapter One: Caroline At Play

Chapter Two: Lawrence Builds a Computer

Chapter Three: Caroline and Anne-Marie

Chapter Four: After the Night of Miracles

Chapter Five: Caroline Approaches

Chapter Six: After the Change

Chapter Seven: Caroline and Lawrence

Chapter Eight: After the Fall

Her name was Caroline Frances Hubert, and she had three claims to fame.
In the first place she was the thirty-seventh oldest living human being. Caroline herself was unimpressed by this fact. To her way of thinking it was the result of an accident, nothing more. In any case she had been the thirty-seventh oldest human being for a long, long time, and it got to seem more of a bore than an accomplishment after a while.
In the second place she had once been infected with rabies. Caroline was rather proud of this distinction, though it had also been a long time ago. There was a certain class of people who were quite impressed with Caroline's bout with rabies, not so much because she survived it but because she
hadn't
. It had taken Prime Intellect fifty-six hours to realize it couldn't repair the damage to her nervous system, to backtrack, and to put her together again like Humpty Dumpty. For fifty-six hours, she had not existed. She had been dead. And she was the only one of the trillions of souls in Cyberspace who had ever been dead, even for a little while.
In the third place, and most important to Caroline because it represented a real accomplishment rather than an accident or a one-shot stab of cleverness, she was undisputed Queen of the Death Jockeys. She would always be the thirty-seventh oldest person, and after her rabies experiment Prime Intellect had shut the door on further explorations of that nature. But the Death Jockeys constantly rated and ranked themselves by inventiveness and daring and many other factors. It was an ongoing competition, and if Caroline didn't keep working at it she'd be lost in an always-growing crowd of contenders. Caroline wouldn't admit that her high ranking was important to her, but it was all she had and she threw herself at it with an energy that was fierce and sometimes startling.

As she woke up, a window opened up in front of her, a perfect square of light, razor-edged and opaque. One cold message floated within it:

She could have had any surroundings she wanted, even a whole planet of her own design. A waste of time, she felt. Her personal space was minimal. In fact, it was the
bare
minimum, a floor and a gravity field. There was no visual distinction between the floor and the sky or ceiling or whatever you chose to call it. Everything was exactly the same shade of soft white. When she wanted to relax she turned off the gravity and floated in free-fall. When she wanted to sleep, she turned off the light. If she wanted anything else, she called for it and then got rid of it when she was finished.
"Gravity. Keyboard," she demanded. She felt gradually increasing pressure under her feet as a console blinked into existence. Caroline was as conservative as her years -- six hundred and ninety of them -- might suggest, a collector of useless skills and worthless experiences. Typing was one of the useless skills she prized most highly, and her fingers flew rapidly as she discussed the day's business with the Supreme Being: