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amused

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Hackworth was alone and separate from all humanity, a feeling he had grown up with, like a childhood friend living next door. [...] He had been born without the ability to blend and socialize as some are born without hands.

"Standing above it all?" said a voice. "Or standing aside, perhaps?"

It was a man in a clown outfit. Hackworth recognized it, vaguely, as an advertising fetish for an old American fast-food chain. [...]

"Are you of it? Or just in it?" the Clown said, and looked at Hackworth expectantly.

As soon as Hackworth has realized, quite some time ago, that this Dramatis Personae thing was going to be some kind of participatory theatre, he had been dreading this moment: his first cue. "Please excuse me," he said in a tense and not altogether steady voice, "this is not my milieu."

"That's for damn fucking sure," said the Clown. "Put these on," he continued, taking something out of his pocket.

"Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead." The Clown spun on his heel to leave [...].

The thing in Hackworth's pocket was a pair of dark sunglasses: wraparounds with a glimmering rainbow finish, the sort of thing that, decades ago, would have been worn by a Magnum-slinging rebel cop in a prematurely canceled television series. Hackworth unfolded them and slid the polished ends of the bows cautiously over his temples. [...] the bows behind his ears came alive, stretched, and grew around the back of his skull like a rubber band snapping in reverse, joining in the back to form an unbreakable band. "Release," Hackworth said, and then ran through a litany of other standard yuvree commands. The spectacles would not release his head. Finally, a cone of light pierced space from somewhere above and behind him and splashed across a stage. Footlights came up, and a man in a top hat emerged from behind a curtain. "Welcome to your show," he said. "You can remove the glasses at any time by securing a standing ovation from not less than ninety percent of the audience."

[...] He tried a few more commands. Most phenomenoscopes had a transparent mode, or at least translucent, that allowed the wearer to view what was really there. But these ones were doggedly opaque and would only show him a mediatronic rendering of the scene. The strolling and chatting theatergoers were represented by preposterously oversimplified wire-frames, a display technology unused these eighty years or so, clearly intended to irritate Hackworth. Each figure had a large placard strapped to its chest:
JARED MASON GRIFFIN III, aged 35
(too late to become an interesting
character like you!)
Nephew of an earl-level Equity Lord
(don't you envy him?)
Married to that sunken bitch on his right
They go on these little escapades
to escape their own crippled lives
(why are you here?)
Hackworth looked down and tried to read the placard on his own chest but couldn't focus on it.

When he walked around the deck, his viewpoint changed correspondingly. There was also a standard interface that enabled him to "fly" around the ship [...]. Whenever he used this mode, the following legend was superimposed on his view in giant flashing red block letters:

JOHN PERCIVAL HACKWORTH'S GODLIKE PERSPECTIVE

sometimes accompanied by a cartoon of a wizardly sort of fellow sitting atop a mountain peering down into a village of squalid midgets. Because of this annoyance, Hackworth did not use this feature very frequently.