Her little simstim deck was one of the things I’d stacked under my bench the night before, the one I’d fixed for her the day after I’d first seen her. She spent hours jacked into that unit, the contact band across her forehead like a gray plastic tiara. Tally Isham was her favorite, and with the contact band on, she was gone, off somewhere in the recorded sensorium of simstim s biggest star. Simulated stimuli: the world all the interesting parts, anyway as perceived by Tally Isham. Tally raced a black Fokker ground-effect plane across Arizona mesa tops. Tally dived the Truk Island pre-serves. Tally partied with the superrich on private Greek islands, heartbreaking purity of those tiny white seaports at dawn.