There was a slight blue haze round the skeleton's head. When I examined
it more closely, it looked less like a skeleton of bare bones and more
like a physician's chart of the human nervous system, traced out in
thin lines of mush ... little close-packed lines of energy, fixed in
relation to each other but flexible as a whole.
It occurred to me I was looking at a human being, in terms of energy.
And I had just drunk his jeep's ignition!
So thought was a form of energy, after all. For some of the things
he was thinking about the mechanic responsible for maintaining the
jeep were strictly subliminal and Freudian. If he spoke, I doubted if
I would hear him. His voice would just be a very faint wave of mush
traveling indistinctly out.
"And the next time that spark-spark foreman sends me out on an
emergency power-line repair," continued the skeleton, "he can
spark-spark well give me a vehicle that _works_!"
The skeleton's name was Joe, I think. And I watched Joe sway over to
the ribbon of mush I had bitten through.
"Fused," Joe muttered in his head. "Now, what on Earth did that?"
And it struck me for the first time where I was. Back on Earth! As
an e being! A being based, it seemed, on energy and not on matter.
Converted accidentally by the marvels of modern science and the supreme
technological achievement of traveling at the speed of light.