ooc: canon excerpt: of the composition of dolls
Spalanzani picked up a jeweller's loupe and applied his eye to Primavera's umbilicus.
'The navel of the world,' he said, 'the centre of everything. And of nothing. The wormhole of lunacy! Ah yes, descended from L'Eve Future, but what mutations. What exotica!'
He stepped to one side to allow a bar of light to run over his patient from head to toes; a hologram materialized in mid-air. Fleshless, a glittering schema of veins, bones and plastic, the hologram turned, revolving on its axis, displaying itself like a see-through Sally before the eyes of a prurient clientele.
'Most fascinating,' he said. 'Living tissue has adopted the structure of polymers and resins, metals and fibres. It is difficult to perceive in what sense she is actually alive.'
'Dead girls,' I said. 'They call them dead girls. Primavera's DNA has recombined.'
'I don't think we'd find DNA in this,' he said, his finger jabbing the hologram's thigh. 'Recombined? The entire body chemistry has been altered, reorganized at the atomic level. Mechanized, you might say. By every definition I can think of she is dead.' His finger moved to the hologram's belly. 'This, I suppose, is what gives her life. Animation, at least. The sub-atomic matrix. I read about it in Scientific American.' He poked at a ball of green fire that swirled with op-art geometries; chaoses that teased with intimations of order; finitudes that knew no bounds. 'The matrix,' he said, picking up a syringe, 'is where our trouble lies.'
I put my hand on his wrist. 'What's in that?'
'I want -- with your permission -- to inject a remote.'
'You don't need his permission,' said Kito.
'Please,' he said, 'I must see what is happening in there.' I released my hand.
The needle pricked the taut flesh, emptying a clear solution into Primavera's belly. 'Good girl,' he said, his hand lingering a little too long, I thought, on his patient's abdominal wall. 'That didn't hurt, did it?' He sat down at a keyboard; a monitor lit up, and fractals, in vortices of green, loomed from the screen's vanishing point, like abstract representations of unresolved crescendos, the music of unrequited desire. I tottered forward, those shifting geometries threatening to suck me into some terrible fastness of space and time.
Freezeframe; the germination ceased, and I was pitched forward by my vertigo's inertia. 'The dust,' he said. 'It is carrying an anti-fractal programme that is infecting the matrix with Euclidean imperatives.' He turned from the monitor, wiped his pince-nez on his sleeve, and sighed. 'At the heart of the matrix lies her source of being. Space-time foam. Ylem. The nanomachines will replicate smaller and smaller until that singularity is breached. And then she will fall victim to the laws of the classical universe. ... As far as I've ever been able to understand, L'Eve Future, and their descendants, the Lilim, retain in themselves a model of the quantum field, a model of creation, a bridge, if you like, between this world and the mind of God. And now it seems that bridge is burning.'
-- Richard Calder, Dead Girls, pp. 70-72