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Then he reaches back out, and with a nod of the head has a head again. It's still Ellery, unmistakably— you guess 8 years isn't that long overall. But his hair is thinner and cropped a little shorter, there's fine lines around his dark circles, and there's <span class="mu-i">grey</span>— a few strands near his temples, a lot in his perpetual stubble.
He looks tired. Madrigal looks tired, too, and sinks back heavily. An opportunity! "So what <span class="mu-i">is</span> locitis?"
"Ah," Ellery says, and shuts his eyes. "You had your fun. Can we leave it at that?"
"No," you say.
"...And you're not going to stop asking."
"Yes," you say.
"Fuck." He vibrates his knee. "It's— I don't know what you've heard about it. It's not a disease. It's a collection of symptoms."
"Of?"
"It's... it's complicated to... you have to know about Headspace first. Headspace's whole thing, see, was to upend the idea of manses. Before them, anybody could make one, but for the average guy it took a shit-load of time and patience and sometimes help. They came in, and they said they could stick a manse in anybody, foolproof, and they could do it overnight."
"I kind of figured it was that," you say.
"Okay. Well, they could. Kind of. As it turns out, you can't just <span class="mu-i">inject</span> a manse into somebody's skull. It doesn't work like that. What you <span class="mu-i">can</span> do is manufacture a precise copy of the original person, identical except that the copy comes with a manse pre-installed. And you swap the two, and you destroy the original painlessly, and it's exactly as if you'd injected the manse. If it's done in a person's sleep, nobody would ever know the difference."
You did not figure this. "Uh... that's..."
"That's the most fucked-up thing I've ever heard," Madrigal says. "What the fuck?"
"No, it isn't, Maddie. And it's not..." Ellery shifts. "It's not like people's <span class="mu-i">bodies</span> are being vaporized. It's all metaphysical. But you don't need to know how it works, okay? That was the good scenario, and that's not what happened. Somebody made it so that the originals weren't destroyed."
You think. "The cracks?"
"Yeah." He grasps the lounge chair. "So it wasn't a swap. Every time somebody used— or uses, we're pretty sure— a Headspace product like an E.Z.-M.A.N.S.E., what it does from their perspective is suck them into a white void. It's infinite and unescapable. They'll stay there for as long as it takes them to wither into nothing. Meanwhile, the person outside, the copy, doesn't react well to this. Because they're not the original, or because of the void, or because there's two of them out there— something. They have mood swings, memory loss, apoplexy. They die, sometimes." Ellery flourishes unenthusiastically. "Locitis. It has nothing to do with jackers."
(2/3?)
