Head043-c

Malena was careful to keep the two sections of the portal close together. "Okay, if I understand it correctly," she explained, "this thing has a range of about a metre and a half, so if you took my body over to the other side of the room, I wouldn't have any control."

"Would it be safe?" I asked. "Would it still support your breathing? And what about circulation, would that be okay?"

"Certainly," she said, "they've tested all that stuff at distances of well over a kilometre, it's just that the nervous system works on much tighter tolerances. The signals get scrambled, they don't make any sense when they get to the far end of the portal and you lose control."

"So if I brought your body over here, I could do what I liked to it and you wouldn't be able to stop me doing it?"

"That's right. Effectively, I'd be just a disembodied head on a pedestal over here, and over there you'd have a body with all my usual physical reactions, but without my mind in control of it."

"You won't get any of the sensations from your body when I do stuff to it."

"My brain would get all the chemical signals carried in my bloodstream, so I'd get the physiological symptoms of arousal, but I won't get anything that normally gets carried along the nerves. I'll be able to see what you're doing, of course, unless you turn me around so I'm looking the wrong way. I won't get to see anything if you do that."

"So is that what you want me to do? Take your body away from you, so you become completely helpless, and then do things to it to see what happens?"

"Yes," she said, "that's exactly what you should do. It's the whole reason I ordered the portal in the first place."