Free Castles Made of Sand by Gwyneth Jones

The world was dark and shaking, he could hardly focus on the kid’s scared face. ‘I know what I meant to ask you. D’you know where Sage is?’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Verlaine, eyes big as saucers. ‘Sage. I better get Sage, I’ll get him. He’s teaching. You stay—’
    ‘No thanks. I’ll find him myself.’
    Aoxomoxoa, in sharp black and white as if for a stage performance, the skull at high contrast, was holding his class in a quiet spot by the Blue Lagoon marquee, a slwe of wireless hardware spread around him. He had the kids looking at animation on their cellulose-based-plastic slates, while he talked to them about how their brains worked.
    What a privilege to minister to the awakening of these young minds.
    ‘You see, whatever you “see”, whatever you “hear”, whatever you “touch”, et cetera, what your brain experiences is a pattern of fire. See that? How it washes over the whole brain, like, mm, a cloud of sparks? When I write my immersions I copy those patterns, and make your brains believe they’ve had the experience. I do it visually, and I’ll explain why that works best in a moment. I write the code, and I deliver it on a carrier wave of visible light. I don’t even have to fake the patterns very well , because brains love being fooled, yeah, what?’
    ‘Did you always want to be a rockstar?’
    ‘No. I wanted to be a dancer, or a gymnast. But I’m too tall, and I have weird hands, so I had to give up the idea.’
    So much for delusions of grandeur. This was not an Aoxomoxoa masterclass. He gave those as well and they were hard work, but this here was just a celebrity warm-up. No one expected him to teach the kids anything. He only had to turn up, looking like Aoxomoxoa, move the mouth, do some tricks: make the children (and the hedgeschool teachers) feel included in the new idea. And he was doing it. He wasn’t going to let Ax down, just because they’d broken up. He’d carry on with everything that was asked of him, though it was cinders and ashes.
    Ah, well. Back to the Sanskrit.
    ‘Okay, now all the visual information that registers in your eyes, mostly at this little spot called the fovea, goes to the back of yer head and then ends up here, in the middle temporal cortex, which is right in the middle, conveniently, of where the rest of your senses are handled. When I send the fake information on my carrier wave, the MT starts thinking it’s having an experience. It goes through its cache, looking for a real experience it might be having. This alerts the hippocampus (little thing allegedly shaped like a seahorse, down in here), and triggers the whole brain to get involved, whoosh , with emotions, sensations, the whole thing. That’s when the punters at my gigs get convinced that what’s happening is totally real, because insofar as a brain knows reality, it is real. Sharks biting them, clouds of butterflies, flocks of seagulls, ravening werevoles, whatever. It isn’t incredibly hard, if you use the right hooks—’
    The children gazed at him like sponges. ‘Oh,’ said a girl in the front row, about ten years’ old, a toddler dozing on her knees, ‘ MT . That says Em Tee! Is that why the other track on Morpho , besides ‘Morpho’, is called ‘The Empty Zone’?’
    Morpho was the Heads’ first album, the first immersion record in the world. They’d lost the rights when they broke up with their record company, which had for years been a very sore point. But eventually you see reason. Morpho had been written and released before this child was born.
    ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you got it—’ suddenly feeling that this was indeed a privilege, and also feeling like a, a talking trilobite. I am ancient . They know nothing before: I am the first page of their history books. Or would be, except most of them can’t read… Over the kids’ heads he saw Ax coming towards him. No way to escape so he waited in silence: while Mr Dictator came ambling around the children.
    ‘’Scuse