I was brooding on this and belching contentedly with a sort of cracking noise, when the skeleton came driving over the surface of the mush ball. It was in a framework of mush shaped like a jeep but squirting delicious little fountains of liquor in the front, where the engine of a real jeep would have been. I moved over and tasted them. And the whole framework stopped.
"Triple purple hell," said a voice. "The damned thing's broken down again. Wait till I get my hands on that idiot mechanic!"
"Hey," I vibrated. "Where are you?"
"Now I'll have to walk all the way back, I suppose," the voice added.
The skeleton got out of the mush jeep, walked through me and lifted the hood.
"Battery flat," the voice said disgustedly. "Not a drop of juice in it."
I began to feel guilty.
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.