Evangeline Ingram sits at her table at Club Coze, and gives the appearance of quietly reading her book.
What she is experiencing is this:
1: Words, on a page. She watched as Foxen's bottle was caught by an eddy and swirled well out of reach behind a trio of slanting copper pipes. The font is cursive, the words familiar. She has read this story before; it's her favorite.
2: A brilliant, impressionistic flare of imagination in her mind's eye. She can see the bottle, see the curve of its glass, the soft gleam of Foxen's phosphorescent light half-glimped through the dark water, the individual rivets in the copper pipe.
3: The background ambience of the club; low voices, rolling dice, tiles clacking, the clatter of utensils on plates. It's an indistinct hubbub, calming and soothing and right.
4: In her peripheral vision, the shapes of people passing by. She notices them quietly, almost subconciously, but they are there.
5: The ambient scent of freshly-made pizza and cinnamon perfume.
6: The feeling of the crisp pages beneath her fingers, the binding of the book blunt-sharp against her propped-up hand, the weight of the slim volume still noticeable.
7: The tactile semisensation of the enclosing wards around her, like a warm hug from a dear friend. She knows instinctively that she is safe here.
This is all managed by the pendant at her throat, which holds the device known as a split-stream method. It breaks her attention into two parts; the part attending to her book and the café, and the part attending to everything else.
8: S (1) h (4) e (1) (6) flickers a spark of pleasure in the core of her soul, bound on a whim to the scrabble value of each word she reads. It happens to be tactile in flavour, so she gets to enjoy a soft stroke of a hand through her hair, followed by a light scratch, then another light stroke; all layered with the overall weight of the word, which is enough to feel like a light caress at her breast. This takes as long to feel as it takes to read the word "She." F (4) o (1) x (8) e (1) n (1) (15) would be enough to draw a yelp from her (both on account of the x and the overall word weight) but for the fact that she has a whole second attention that lies untouched by the warm breath across her clitoris.
8: A soft soundscape drawn entirely from the ambient noise of the cafe, but distorted and remixed, wavering like a candleflame. As her second attention wanders from one noise to the next, it takes pride of place in the symphony; a low voice, "So you want to come back to my room?" is transformed into sung lyrics.
9: The scrabble program is also running on every individual background voice, modulated by volume and the fraction of attention directed.
10: A host of vivid, fully detailed memories of all the times she's been in club coze or eaten pizza or smelled perfume or read this book, gathered together like loose constellations, hanging about her in ethereal splendour as her second attention flickers from detail to detail, each one calling up a new scene, a new memory. They come and go in a flash; her attention darts and leaps like a silverfish, never blurred in motion as she percieves at the speed of thought, flashflashflashflashflashflash -
11: And in her split-stream method, there is a small custom addition, fragmenting her attention again, and so there is a third her, who dwells in the palace of memory and lingers intimately on each and every detail and stays in the richness and the depth and the savour of it, even as she percieves instantaneously every detail;
12: but most of her dwells in the present, where the weight of her book echoes the weight of every person she's ever held, and the crispness of its pages holds the coldness of fallen snow, and the blunt-sharp of its cover digs into her like the fingers of a lover;
13: and the taste of cinnamon lingers on her breath, sweet and fiery, and the people passing by are seen in every detail even as she reads her book, cooly assessed and stripped of their secrets as far as the wards will allow her to go -
14: And all things are deep and vibrant and right and beautiful and you could not understand it, not truly, not if I wrote you three whole volumes on the subject.
15: And still there is more, because not all her senses have analogues I could describe to you well even if I did write those three volumes.
16: But you must understand that she is still only reading a book, which is hardly the most stimulating of pastimes.