The spider was fat.

As all hoary predators, it was alternately brazen and sly, cagey and belligerent, compensating with guile what it had lost to age and the ravages of time. Into a meticulously rendered universe of milky matrices and opalescent geometry, Dorian fluttered after it, tickling skeins, tugging at anchors, freefalling through the immeasurable vastness of a cerulean space. His palms were damp, his fingers trembled. The spider might have been bloated and limping along on legs so old and cockeye hacked that the compilers couldn’t even decipher its business anymore, but it was wise, and if it suspected for even a moment that he was stringing it along, it would scurry away into one of its endless black warrens of binary detritus where he might never see it again. Dorian was savvy to all the latest tricks, but the spider was the master of this environment. It had likely been feeding on the network a dozen years before he had assembled his first Vorman-perl script.

That was what he believed, at least, that the spider was ancient, an unearthed artifact, splendid in its antiquity. And crafty. Ever so crafty to have survived undetected for so long. So he had come after it with guile of his own. He’d been laying his traps for almost two weeks, off and on, salting packets of bait along the back alleys of the data structure, each bundle of code a lexicon of chaos text that was more noise than signal, but noise pregnant with its own nefarious structure. Tasty bits like the pixellated approximation of a skittering housefly. He taught himself what the spider liked, what it ignored, what it processed and what it left behind once the gorging was done. Then he built his own database of its tastes, and refined his applications to suit the particular interests of his target. He watched and waited, measured the spider’s strikes in picoseconds and studied the web vibrations as it dragged its soft and pale underbelly along the dynamic datascape.

And all the time, he scuttled along surreptitiously behind the beast and plugged the holes it had chewed in the fabric of the network. He learned many of its favorite paths and its trapdoor escape routes. He buried his sensors and dug his holes, lined the walls of data-dense caverns with pungi sticks of Escher algorithms and Moebius logic.

He bided his time.

And waited.

Made guesses.

Made himself miserable, in fact.

He’d only gotten a good look at it once. No, that wasn’t true. It hadn’t even been a proper look, just the poor facsimile of a faded image. The spider was a thing of nightmares, line after line of the most scabrous and key-jacked code he’d ever seen. Old perl, some original pre-Protocol Vickers Standard, a sublime injection of Gancet and R-ASP synthesis logic. He’d somehow snapshotted the tail end of it, a lucky cache dump in the fraction of a second before the temp logs evaporated, and what he had extracted from even that bare snippet had kept him busy for days untying logical knots and parsing impossible strings. So much work just to deconstruct a thing that should never have been. It was like excavating some antediluvian monstrosity.

The jack who had written it was a pure genius.

But Dorian had it now. Almost. He’d tracked it here, to a confluence of nodes where the spider peered out from an undocumented port with a dead ping address. The port was left over from some decade forgotten upgrade most likely, and had been elegantly concealed by code-magery Dorian still didn’t properly understand.

He watched as slowly, stealthily, the hidden gate to its lair swung open. A blast of camouflaging nonsense digits spewed along the system backbone, and the spider peered out into the electric night, sniffing for the scent of prey, then shuffled along its favorite subnet, wicked and wary and full of malice.

Dorian heaved his orientation from render to the static universe, where he could study the beast from a careful distance and read his passive diagnostics the way a careful angler might gauge the wind or decipher the ripples in a rustic pool.

He couldn’t help but be nervous. Likely as not, he only had one shot at quelling this threat.

This was what he knew: the spider liked neuraloptics. It liked metempsychosis. It really liked mysticism and Trismegistus and eschatechnology. But most of all, it liked zap and entropy and Ravillean physics. Those were the things it couldn’t resist.

So Dorian had built his snare: a partial treatise on neural cognition seasoned throughout with a randomized Pythagorean diatribe in poorly translated Greek. A zap depot technical manual–unstrung into 32-bit discretes, then strung out again, only backwards. Odds and ends mostly, the product of all his maddening statistical analysis.

But the spider tasted none of this, not yet.

What it scented was a raw copy of the unauthorized Strand pirate of Raville’s thesis defense from the late ‘70’s. Highly apocryphal. This was the lure. If it was careful, as Dorian expected it would be, the spider would dart out from its safe haven, perpetrate a smash and grab against the curious bit sectors that had attracted its attention, then retreat back to its port to devour and digest in safety. But once it ventured near enough, there would be the enticing aroma of zap, of Hermes, and other cognitive delights. Tempted, it would draw near to investigate. It would attempt to sample, to poke and prod the curious file. Eventually, it would dig itself in to suck at the sweet fountain of a carefully crafted logical matrix. And so it would trigger the trap: an endless loop of data paralysis that mainlined into an abyss of random keywords that would last as long as the power grid. The spider would gorge until it popped.

It was a good plan. A sneaky plan.

But there was also some risk. Dorian had a malicious counterscript ready to plug its port with a cascading hexadecimal screen to confuse the spider and cut off its escape. That was well and good, standard infiltration script containment stuff, but what he couldn’t predict was how the spider would respond to such a direct frontal assault. Thus far, their game had been cat and mouse. He had made assumptions about the nature of the beast for which he had no supporting evidence. Most worrying, perhaps, was that he couldn’t be absolutely certain that there wasn’t a cache-delete routine in the spider’s grab bag of tricks. Once Dorian slammed the door on its escape, it was distinctly possible that he wouldn’t be able to get that door open again, and while he fought with the lock, the port could very well be mass purging the entire trove of purloined files the spider had been hoarding. Dorian might never know what it had been mining lo these many insidious years.

And to make matters worse, there was always the possibility that he might lose track of the spider itself when the digits began to fly. It would have other lairs that he hadn’t discovered or outright evacuation nodes that would bounce it off the network and back to wherever it had come from, taking all its harvested bits along with it.

He just didn’t know, and the not-knowing was maddening.

That was why Dorian didn’t want to just kill the spider. He wanted to autopsy it. He needed to know where it came from and what it thought it was doing. Killing it outright was as good as losing, because otherwise he might never learn how his network had been breached.

So he watched and he waited, a little more breathless than he would have liked to admit. He tracked the spider’s progress from bait packet to bait packet, devouring the happy little breadcrumbs farther and farther away from its lair.

The spider didn’t resist. It couldn’t really. It was, after all, just a rogue application, a packet of ancient and obsolete languages, whose only real defense after all this time had been stealth and its ability to shuffle bits back and forth with such meager throughput that the network efficiency routines didn’t notice it.

It heaved its ponderous bulk along the logical path of a backwater subnet, still deceptively quick on its fat and agile constructs, drawing farther and farther still from its safe haven. At random intervals, it sprang a tremulous flicker of diagnostics ahead, wary of data sentinels, competing scavengers, or security protocols. It sensed nothing.

And gently as the drop of a curtain, the trap snapped shut. The gatekeeper script executed and sealed the port behind it. Dorian ground his teeth together and waited for the signal that a mass purge had been initiated, but none came. If the spider noticed, it gave no sign. It lumbered to the edge of the pit Dorian had dug for it, snuffled the ground for clues, then plunged headlong into the abyss.

It sucked deep and it sucked long.

Dorian geeked into datascape just to get a look at it. The spider rendered as a great gelatinous glob, all black eyes and reticulated limbs, and it was still very much alive and kicking. It heaved against the jaws of the trap, buried to the thorax in binary mire, back legs angled toward the blank sky, clenching and releasing in a mindless autonomic rhythm. But there was no escape. The moment the spider had executed into its extraction routines, Dorian’s pit had logged the read/analysis-request and launched a standard trollware defense counteragent which immediately began opening the spider in a dozen analysis tool formats. Bit generators strafed its internal code segments with randomly generated spurious characters. The pit itself fired up quik-load bitstream accelerators that dug into the spider’s buffer array like so many jagged hooks and flooded its SAM stacks at an alarming, transfixing, and ultimately inescapable rate. It was the equivalent of piercing the spider’s hide with a score of surgical needles and hyper-injecting into its heart a redundantly lethal dose of targeted neurotoxin.

The spider shuddered once more, like a man shown the head of the gorgon, and turned to stone.

Dorian geeked out again, ran a routine capture and quarantine on the address block, and sat back in his chair. He clasped his hands together behind his head and sighed. He’d really hoped for something more challenging, more epic after so much time and effort.

An immensely unsatisfying task, all in all.

***

During the several minutes it took to set up and begin delivering a recover-and-archive ghost of the dead port, he amused himself with an anonymous node crack of a server at the regional offices of the ubiquitous one-stop megamarket chain, Hometown Mart, using an exploit he had picked up off the Strand from a well raved and reliable jack in North Delhi Enclave who called himself Ahura Mazda. Click-click-tat, and the ready-for-release quarterly profit transfer was diverted from corporate coffers to those of a bobcat silicate mining colony in Eudora that the day’s newswire had mentioned was suffering under a combination of factors ranging from general financial destitution and the collapse of the Universal Health Organization, to the skyrocketing cost of antivirals and the plain old money-grubbing of pharmaceutical conglomerates. The outbreak of encephalitis was almost incidental.

He resisted the urge to tag a snarky Thanks for your generous contribution! encrypted NFO file to his hack for Hometown’s IT flunkies to pore over, and finally settled for authorizing the funds transfer with his customary jackid–j0n d33. By the time they parsed what had happened, it would be too late to stop the (proprietary) medical scheme zap to Eudora (an order he had courteously logged and retro-dated for immediate transmission first thing in the morning from the Hometown pharmacy orders database). They could find and read his crack hx on any of the public lists if they really wanted to know why. It wasn’t exactly anarchy, but a few dozen dying moners and their families who would otherwise have perished would get their hands on the meds they desperately needed. Screwing Hometown in the process was just a bonus.

It wasn’t his fault that the promised paradise of the post-zap universe had failed so miserably.

***

A short time later, Amara buzzed into his geek as a swashbuckling manga avatar, all limpid-pool clichés, plaid miniskirts and Lovecraftian angles. He’d completely forgotten that she was still buzzing around on the network.

“You’re making mischief again,” she said without preamble, animated pelvis thrust forward, shoulders back, mouth an impossible pinhole. He should have pointed this dissonant pixellation out to her—he tended to be a stickler for functional anatomical acuracy in avatar design, where human-ish avatars were concerned–but didn’t feel like getting dragged in to help her fix it.

“Nothing nefarious here,” he assured her. “I’m merely savoring a victory over the forces of darkness and chaos. We had an incursion.”

“It’s more than that, otherwise you wouldn’t have that grin.”

“That would be the grin that says I’m up to mischief, eh?”

She did not accuse him of attempting to deceive her directly, only fluttered her eyelashes at him, the innocence of her expression undermined by the precocious flurry of pastel waterfowl which erupted from her ears. Dorian made a mental note to add “Never trust a woman who emotes in cartoon” to his list of Rules to Live By.

“I don’t think you know me well enough to make that assessment,” he said.

“Well, did you get it at least?”

“The spider? It’s in quarantine, yes. I was just about to autopsy it.” The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop them. “Would you like to watch?”

“Geeked or old school?”

“I geeked a wrapper around the script to track it, but I’m going to decompile it in analog. You can see my nifty render if you want, though. I’ll flash you the ip.”

She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Ick, no thanks. I can’t stand to grub around in the text. It’s so tedious.”

“The whole world is text, Amara. Some people just choose not to recognize it for what it is.”

She spun on her tiptoes in a balletic pirouette like the tumbling of autumn leaves. For all Dorian knew, she might just transmogrify into a shower of foliage at any moment. Puffy, pastel leaves, in fact. But instead, she turned on him with her vast round eyes and rodent giggle of amusement, clapped her hands together in front of her chest and trilled, “Oh, you are so precious!”

“I’m being precious?” he snapped. “Hello, my job is deconstructing malicious loads and figuring out how they work.”

She didn’t speak, but the local environment reverberated with her response: The whole world is text, Amara.

It was his own voice, rolled down a mocking octave.

Cute.

“Look, this doesn’t strike you as remotely odd?” he asked. “You’re sitting two meters away from me, and instead just asking me what I’m doing, or God forbid, coming and looking over my shoulder, you jack into my geek and start giving me a hard time.”

A flock of spontaneous neon question marks sprang from her forehead. “I was already on the Strand.”

“It isn’t natural. That’s what I’m saying.”

“That’s the whole point, darling. It’s better than natural.”

“Better?”

“If we do it your way, I have to preface a simple question—frex, ‘So what are you up to, John?’–with a bunch of silly and pointless chattermongering. I ask you how your evening is going; you grunt something noncommittal because you hate being disturbed when you’re working. I ask if you have any big plans for the weekend; you respond with something that may or may not be true just to keep up your end of the conversation. Trying probably unsuccessfully, I might add, to act amiable while secretly hoping that I’ll just get to the point. When I do finally get around to dispensing with the accustomed social pleasantries and finally ask what you’re doing exactly, you experience such a profound sense of relief that you become convinced it might actually be a good idea to tell me. So you launch into a tediously detailed technical summary of your entire afternoon’s activities that led ultimately to your grin of satisfaction that attracted my interest in the first place. You unnecessarily try to explain the logic, the binary, and other sundry intricacies of the data structure in such a way that I’ll understand the full scope and magnitude of your brilliance.” She flashed him an insouciant wink. “I’ve sought to avoid all that conversation porn.”

“Conversation porn?” he repeated dully.

“Mindless and disposable verbal transactions that exist solely to preface the ultimate event, but which otherwise completely fail to move the action along. By cutting out all the conversation porn, we skipped all of that annoying interaction and got right down to the important bits, to wit, that you were spiking an intruder and proud of yourself for it. My way is a more efficient mode of communication.”

He sighed. “It’s more efficient data transfer.”

“Yes, that, too.” She grinned, and if she’d attached another saucy wink to it, he had no doubt that he would have been forced to infect her system plugs with a file eating viral agent, just on general principle. “But hey, it’s getting late. Do you want some coffee? It sounds like you’ve got a long evening ahead of you.”

“Please.”

The avatar waved at him. “You’re such a luddite, John. That’s what makes you so adorable.”

Before he could respond, she popped out of existence, leaving behind a shower of marshmallow stars that insisted on defying gravity in the most aggravating way.

***

In a universe pregnant with quantum packets of data signal, mega-bandwidth spew and infotainment on demand for anyone who wanted to jack in any time/anywhere, personal office space had become an obsolete concept. Anything that was networked, noded, or otherwise woven into the Strand could be accessed from anywhere else, provided you had the gear, the wetwires and the access–or the skills to slip around the security barring you from access. Most of these nodes were cleverly rendered in geek as towering and byzantine edifices, pseudo-Gothic pagan temples, or anything else that could be imagined and subsequently pixellated. If he chose to, John Dorian could make the virtual walk to work from his coffin in Quiksand passing along the way a pearl studded replica of Notre Dame, the lovely and imposing Reichstag, a withering graphical ode to Old Fenway Park that interminably looped through the final, heart shattering play of the ’96 Series and the Man of Steel’s Fortress of Solitude, all without ever physically leaving home. In between were more modest structures cribbed from architectural drawings, historical landmarks and the pure stuff of fancy (ref. the Gilman Brothers reinterpretation of Walt Disney’s reinterpretation of the fairy castle). The cheap structures were defended at the gates by cross-armed code heavies known to the industry as golemechs–glorified sentinel scripts that unobtrusively read your .sec file and granted access based on the permissions they found there. Upscale constructs used outright .sec recognition portals of varying complexity, invisible to the unauthorized geeked eye, and tougher to crack (in theory) than a golemech.

Geek had churches and pornariums, freeways and billboards, free speech and gangland violence. Fake cafes in which to chat. One hour motels for more sordid business. Banks and beaches, museums and casinos, everything the heart could envision, the congloms could make a buck on, and jacks could code, render, borrow or steal. And everywhere were beautiful people: rock stars, vid characters, clumsy n00b renders and horribly (or–gasp!–competently) cobbled cliparts that jerked down the sidewalk like Romerotesque zombies. Half the people Dorian knew walked the real streets in geek on those rare occasions when they did venture out into the flesh and blood world because they didn’t recognize the natural landmarks without it.

And for other reasons, too. Richness was one. Experience. Diversity.

The fact that Sonali Real sucked.

That was the world as he knew it. A dead end, anonymous cityscape teetering on the outermost limits of human commerce and exploration, plugged into a fake experience that was popularly accepted as more real, more vibrant, more everything than reality itself.

So really, if you could get the whole universe on the Strand, who needed–who wanted–to physically move the meat to get to work? Who needed to actually be present when the space that would have been your office could be much more usefully applied to the purpose of storing stuff that had legitimate commercial value? That was the billion rupee question, wasn’t it?

Who needed the world when you had the full and immanent potentiality of the infinite metaverse at your synaptic command?

All of this served to explain why Dorian’s office was a grubby cubicle in the basement surrounded by blinking quantum server boxes that exhaled noxious, supercooled electronic effluvia into a cramped warren of packing boxes, metal shelves and rolls of fiberoptic cable. He’d had to fight just to get a simple thing like a desk, a box of pens, a stapler. And he was the only member of the crack technical staff who set foot inside the office more than twice a year–one of those times being the freaking corporate Christmas party.

And that was why he walked to work.

Dorian was a luddite. He liked the tactile pleasure of clicking keys. He liked the existential distance of digital interactions mediated by motherboards and photon guns rather than images rendered directly into his cortical mass. Most of all, he liked to live in a self-contained and consciously delineated reality that was distinct from the intrusions of the Strand. His reality was a determined and emergent sum, es, est, rather than a representational communal fantasy of eritis.

He liked to grub about in the text, for God’s sake. He took a deep and illicit pleasure in it.

In geek, he had a dozen tools at his disposal for dealing with the spider. He kept them locked in a virtual workshop on the network, hung on pegs, neatly arranged, frequently dusted so they didn’t look like they were mouldering from lack of use. The complex extractors that rendered as shop vacs; binary constructors that pretended to be clamps and nail guns; three flavors of decompiler that tried to pass themselves off as air hammers. Rows upon rows of sundry analysis scumware purchased for him by departmental leads with more money than sense and too much access to tech literature for their own good. (Not to mention, all those good natured, glad-handing, ethically dubious vendors who pushed the bleeding edge releases of these internally cohesive Strand phenomenals as a going-places corporation’s best defense against the constant assault and new-fangled tricksterisms of malcontents and madjackers lurking in the virtual alleys of the Strand.) Each of these products was not only capable of, but happy to, reconstruct the senseless muck of code structures and arcane language modules he was expected to encounter in the course of his duties into readily grokkable artifacts. Technology so simple and user friendly a secretary could run it, they crowed, as if that was something to be proud of.

Dorian hated those tools. Geek made everything falsely intimate. It filtered an alphanumeric world of simple absolutes through the deceptive cheesecloth of messy sense experience. By slabbing more code onto the original in the interest of interpretation, geek introduced imprecision, fuzzed the edges, until you couldn’t be certain if you were deconstructing the object itself or your subconscious prejudices of the object.

Geek was a map, and no matter how easy it was to read, how provocative the render, the map was most certainly not the territory.

The territory was characters and digits, black and white, and everyone who didn’t recognize that fact was utterly and completely lost. They just wouldn’t admit it to themselves. Because they had a map, of course.

Dorian was in the business of knowing things, of really understanding the works–and through them, the minds–of thieves, exploit hacks, data miners and jacks of all trades. Code told you secrets that a render could only approximate. It whispered oracles about the creators, tricksters and techjockies who really controlled the universe.

People like him, to some extent. The diversions of his nihilistic Hometown fetish aside, geek security was what he did. Or at least it was what he did for the small haven of the data pleroma that was the Sonali (Real and Imagined) Masonic Archive Infocache. His father would have called it a self-storage barn for the snooty set, and would have called Dorian a security guard, which was partially true–except that he got paid quite a bit better, and didn’t have to carry a gun.

He rolled his chair up to his desk and refreshed his monitor screen. The monitor was connected through a wiring conduit and accelerated fiber-optic lines to the primary quantum Strand box in the next room. The machine was called Abramhelin, and it was the Archive’s network backbone. His interface was a standard keyboard he’d had assembled from an old computing schematic he’d located in one of the digital stacks.

Amara appeared a short time later with coffee. He hardly glanced at her, recognized her even less. This week, she was some sort of quasi-saurian thing. Crimson scales like flecks of ruby that shimmered in the buzzing, bleached purple glow of the fluorescent lights. It made her look as though she was enclosed in a penumbra of blood. Her eyes were slitted, red at the edges, black in the center. There was a startling golden mohawk down the center of her elongated skull. Completely androgynous and naked, as far as he could tell, which truthfully, was not that great a distance. The scales made it difficult to surmise without staring, and her fangs were an adequate deterrent against egregious ogling.

Amara Cain had been his office mate for all of six months. She was a hard copy archivist who had been displaced from her cube upstairs when management had brought in the big MicroSun Docutizer™ to replace most of the standard dox archivists in her section. She specialized in written texts, personal journals, scribbled diaries–items that required hand scanning and individualized verification, usually for high end clients.

Dorian didn’t know what she’d done or who she’d pissed off to end up consigned to the dungeons with him, but he liked having her around. She came to work every day. Which probably meant that there was something wrong with her that ran deeper than her sociopathic selection of avatars.

“I like that better than the last one,” he said, because some part of his animal brain told him that he was morally required to say something in return for her effort in getting the coffee. Pay her a compliment on her appearance—the verbal equivalent of chimpanzees picking nits off one another’s backsides. “Seriously, that other one was—eh—it was…what was it supposed to have been exactly?”

“A Mi-go,” she said. “Or an artistic reinterpretation of one. The tentacles kept getting caught in my coffin door.”

“Well, this one is better. Definitely. I mean that.”

“You don’t like it.” When she frowned, he could see the jagged line of her canines with alarming clarity.

“Not at all. It’s just that I sort of imagined you as more avian. Not a criticism, of course, just saying. You have–had–a natural avian build, I thought.”

“Ugh. Avian has been done to death, and it takes weeks to mod the wings.” She set the cup on his desk, out of the way of his elbows.

He looked away. “Well, this is interesting, at least. Very unique.”

Which was high praise, as he measured such things..

“It’s my own design. With summer coming on, cold-blooded seemed more natural. The rest is dramatic effect.” She grinned at him, exposing the full double row of her filed, predatory teeth. “But I’m leaving my palms and soles native. So I can sweat.”

“You should pixellate it,” he said, nodding vigorously. The universal sign for waning interest.

She blinked her epicanthal folds at him as though he was being nonsensical. “That’s silly. No one would know me if I changed my avatar now. I’ve been Ryoku for–well, for months.”

They would recognize her in spite of any modification she made, of course. They’d just overwrite her new render with their preferred avatar of her, probably were doing it already, if they had any sense. He’d gone through a phase a couple of years ago where he jacked all the avatars in his address cache into balloon animals. It was difficult to take people so seriously that way. Downside was that it was hard to tell what a balloon animal was thinking from its expression and body language. He’d thought about experimenting with color and shading simulations of emotional triggers and had actually started working on the algorithms before it dawned on him that doing so would be like admitting he had most likely gone completely and immedicably insane. He had scrapped the whole project for the sake of his mental health.

Amara patted his shoulder. “I’ve got to get back to this new bequest of dox. Are you going to purge the local net over this incursion?”

“Not on purpose. It depends on how deep our friend drilled and what systems he may have compromised. I can give you a Schrödinger bubble address on one of the other boxes if you need some temporary storage as a precaution.”

“Don’t worry about it. If you crash my data, I’ll just eat you.”

For some reason, he doubted that she was completely kidding.

Chapter 2 –>

<– Chapter 1 / Chapter 3 –>

It was worse than he had thought–an absolute worst case scenario by all indications.

With the code shell decompiled, he was finally able to nail down the spider’s quantum log signature and make reasonable guesses about the way it had gone about its business. Its modus operandi appeared to have been a standard quick-couple and scan of incoming bits, then the rapid application of some seriously sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms, followed by a catchall keyword search-match, all perpetrated across a variety of media platforms. Most of the original source plugs and codecs were grievously outmoded–.swfs, .cags, .mngs–but there was evidence that adaptive cognition strands had been engineered in the R-ASP using rudimentary logic trees that allowed for cross-platform extrapolation. The logs indicated it had stuttered a bit while making the initial evolutionary leaps, but eventually it had adapted from text and character signifiers to corneal-cochlear-neural object phenomenalism, which had been barely an infant field of study when Gancet and Vickers Standard were pushing the far boundaries of their models.

The jack who had written the spider had predicted CCNP’s (seenop, the mediative language of geek) emergence as the dominant coding convention by at least a decade. Such prophetic thinking explained how the spider had navigated the network’s security protocols undetected for so long. By the time the servers had been upgraded from text based applications to phenomenal object drivers, the spider had already entrenched itself into the network’s core and woven its invisible skeins. It wrote itself into the subsequent upgrades as an atypical prediagnostic superpacket tasked with outsourcing particular binary stings into the same spontaneously generated quantum foam the viral scanners used to quarantine suspicious data blocks. By the time the probability field where the quarantined data was being processed collapsed, the spider had already routed its own data into a warren of transfer bubbles preselected to collapse into patterns that matched the original binary packets. These bubbles transformed into discrete focal literals that, in effect, precisely replicated the encoding of the original file without ever touching it in its post-transfer, assembled state.

It was, to be blunt, a magnificent bait-and-switch. The servers assumed that the small bit loss that occurred between transmission and viral certification were infected blocks shunted off into the metaverse.

But the real brilliance of the design was that data was never actually lost in the process. Information theory’s fundamental principles of redundant signal transmission meant that the packets which went missing were always recovered. Signal accounted for the “skips” in the datastream and rebuilt itself. Which meant that no one ever went looking for documents that didn’t exist, so no one caught on.

Dorian could only wish his own cracks were so elegant. A crack that took what it wanted but left it at the same time. Not a copy of the thing, but the thing itself. Not a duplicate, but two originals nonetheless.

The spider had been everywhere. It had drunk deep from the input spew from the very beginning, like a great yawning cat hiding in a screen of reeds about the local watering hole. The imperfectly collapsed foam shards in the error log files–flags of its early transmogrification from text eater to phenomenalist omnivore–popped up in files and quantum lockers that ranged the length and breadth of the network, not a few of which dated back thirty years or more. How long it had been extracting documents before that was anyone’s guess.

He uncovered its temporary weigh stations: system files corrupted to stack unrecognized shadow bits, rider envelopes in the registry, larger opportunistic packets that attached themselves to full blown user applications. Whenever and wherever an object had been created, the spider had already been there weaving a sack for the eggs it expected to lay there one day. The spider was a virus that had penetrated the system so deeply and so long ago that it had become integral to the architecture. Not a parasite that lived off its host, but a host that existed for the sole purpose of quickening its parasite.

Dorian could think of maybe fifty jacks in the business who could have executed such a clever, complex and bitchingly egregious penetration as this one. Forty of them were younger than he was, younger than the script itself. The other ten had taken positions in the defense industry and wouldn’t have bothered with something as relatively low value as the Archive in the first place.

Not that the Archive was immune to assaults by rogue or hxless jacks. Dorian spent his days repelling the clumsy incursions of Illuminati nutcases, Templar fetishists and right wing script kiddies who had convinced themselves that the Archive was the Vatican’s Secret Library Annex and ultimate repository of documentary proof for such blockbuster conspiratorial truths as the clandestine bloodline of Jesus, the Gates Foundation-Rothschild connection and the alien origins of Egyptian mystery cults. Most of them never got past the first CAS buffer. Every once in a while, a really clever amateur jack would take a hint from the successful crack of the Trinitarian Banking Trust and launch an old fashioned, ungeeked code line assault, but Dorian’s homegrown scripts were inevitably more than a match for their n00b ingenuity.

Still, it was a reputation business, and when a kid showed talent, people like Dorian kept tabs on them–usually with recursive viral agents that backtracked the break in and wedged themselves into the jack’s datacore. It helped the kid build a hx; gave him some whuffie to spend. In some circumstances, the benign tracking flags allowed more experienced hands to pull him out of the fire if he botched a big score. It worked until the emerging jack developed the tool set to roust the intruders from his system without crashing it, at which point he (or she) stopped being a kid and was generally recognized as pro competition. Call it altruism, call it tough love mentoring, call it industry self-regulation; Dorian called it keeping your enemy closer.

Bottom line was that Dorian knew everyone, at least by reputation, who could have written the spider. He knew their methods, their conventions, their signature tricks.

This was someone else, an ancient, a Grand Alchemist with one last crimson tincture baking in the furnace.

It gave him a little thrill of excitement, to be honest. Exigo a me non ut optimis par sim sed melior. The currency of the culture was contributions to the knowledge base. For most of the talent, the ascent to legend in the burgeoning community of freelance jacks came by the cunning they displayed in their successful exploits (or less often, in the style which they manifested in their colossal failures). Others made rep by stopping them, by figuring out how to foil the designs of the best. Thwarting a jack of this apparent magnitude could transform Dorian’s hx profile from that of merely an ultra-competent corporate drone to head-turning Dungeon Master.

So he dug deeper. He traced the connections between the nodes and wormholes he had previously discovered and looked for screens which he might have missed, camouflaged pathways that dug deeper or ranged father along the network than he had explored before. He plugged sub-architectural chutes the spider had used to operate behind the scenes. He wrote filler scripts to augment the system’s defenses based on what he had learned from the spider’s successes. He seeded the datascape with tracers and leeches that would attach themselves to future data access requests, then ported the logs into a synthesis engine that would evaluate and tag suspicious requests for future review. Through it all, he looked for bounce points–hidden ports the spider could have used to transmit its data outside the Archive’s network.

Because that was the point, really. The spider was a data scavenger. Its sole reason for being was to gather pre-defined sets of raw information and shunt them off the Archive’s net and into the jack’s remote datacore for storage, analysis or eventual sale.

Except he couldn’t find a bounce, which was a bit disappointing. Such a disturbing and elegant undergrowth of nodes and storage fields and hidden bit pockets, but no equally complex cross-network shuttling system presented a startling inconsistency. He spent a couple of hours scouring all around the dead port the spider had used as its base of operations, then another hour on system history documentation, trying to trace the port’s datascape ip through a progression of hardware upgrades, system patches and assorted recompilations. There was nothing. If the port had ever been active, or had ever pointed anywhere other than interarchitecturally, that fact hadn’t ever been written down.

Of course, the spider was old, and inter-platform hardware compatibility was more difficult to pre-engineer than anticipating the evolution of coding conventions (as the jack had done with seenop). It could be that all the bounce points had long ago been shut down by hardware migrations. Or that the Alchemist had gathered the dox he wanted and simply sealed the ports behind him when he was done, leaving the spider an orphan.

But Dorian didn’t think so. One simply didn’t construct such an elaborate and clandestine mining operation to abandon it after short term gains. Too much overhead. Somebody had thought long and hard writing that spider, and they’d meant it to last a long time.

And there was also the fact that hitting up the Archive had been a prime jack. No one walked away from a score of this caliber without documenting it. If no one knew what you had done, it might as well not have happened at all. That was why all the pro coders left behind a rep cookie. It was like mailing an old jilted lover an invitation to your upcoming wedding; it was basic courtesy. Intrusion for the sake of intrusion alone was the work of an amateur. The spider was not an amateur script. It was professional, time consuming, labor intensive. The jack who owned it would have dropped a cookie if he’d been forced to abandon it. One way or another, he would have made certain that Dorian got it, and that everyone else in the community got it as well.

Which meant that Dorian had missed it. (Pfft.)

Or that old age or something otherwise lethal had befallen the jack himself. (More likely.)

Or, even worse, that he still had a bounce, still was mining data, and was quietly thumbing his nose at all of Dorian’s best efforts. (Ugh.)

So he went back to the text and buried himself in a line by line dissection of the spider and its attendant sub-scripts. The internal activity log was time-stamp deleted every twelve hours, which was only a surprise in that the log existed at all. Most spiders were compiled without them so their activities couldn’t be traced and reconstructed if they were discovered. There wasn’t a sniff in the logic tree of dynamic rep cookie executables, and no references to phantom blocks in the outsource logic. The keysearch list was several thousand lines long, and even with his most sophisticated pattern recognition applications, Dorian didn’t find anything that looked like a gotcha message.

No bounce points. No rep cookies. It was almost as if the spider had spontaneously self-generated from random bit accretion–the proverbial million typewriting monkeys over a million years accidentally reproducing Othello.

And that was perhaps most disturbing of all.

Because if the spider wasn’t bouncing data, it wasn’t a proper crack at all. The enemy wasn’t outside, but on the architecture itself.

It meant the spider was an inside job.

Dorian sat back from his terminal and scrubbed at his eyes with his palms. His corneal implants itched after staring at the screen for too many hours. His coffee had long since gone cold, but he sipped at it anyway. He was long overdue for some sleep.

There was a flashing icon in the corner of his screen. The ETL tool had finished ghosting the contents of the dead node and had compiled an index for his review. Sighing, he brought up the tab and checked the diagnostics. The port’s contents weighed in at something over eight hundred terabytes of data. Not massive, he thought at first, until he started scrolling through the list of files. The most recent ones were fat. Geeks and triDvid. Some audio clips in the gigabyte range. But there were thousands (and thousands and thousands, from the look of it) of old fashioned raw text files. Most of these were something considerably less than a thousand bytes. The date stamps in some cases reached back forty years.

Which was good because Dorian hadn’t been around that long and couldn’t be held responsible for the original incursion. Though he had been around for five years, which should have been plenty long enough to have found the spider before now. Assuming he decided to tell anyone that is, which was looking less and less like a good idea the more he learned.

Dorian continued down the list of recovered files. The file names were ambiguous, following an internal, sequential renaming convention organized by theme. Entropy0001. Signal0004. Raville0185. He was going to have to parse them individually, write something to subject them to context analysis. Just thinking about it gave him a headache.

Chewing his lip, he kicked back from his desk and rolled his chair over to the partition which separated his cubicle from the neighboring one. He peered over the top edge at Amara. She sat at her own desk amid piles of warped bound journals and loose sheafs of age worn paper stock. At the moment, she was hunched over a delicate leather bound diary which lay open in her hands. She scanned a page, turned to the next, scanned again, as though reading.

“Hey, can I ask you a question?” he asked.

She didn’t respond at first, and Dorian wondered if she’d heard him, but after two or three pages, she sat back and sighed.

“Yes?”

“Engrossing work?”

She shook her head. “I have no idea. I don’t read German.”

Amara spent her days reading in and out of geek, comparing the results, and uploading the corneal signal onto the network.

“Frau Stein is going into zap sometime midweek and has requested a complete storage refresh,” she explained. “It’s a rush job. The lady fancies herself an historian. Did you want something?”

“You’re pretty knowledgeable about the data in the archives, right?”

“I suppose. To the extent that anyone can be, Dorian. There are billions of files.”

“But you get around,” he said, then added quickly, “on the network, I mean. You’ve been inside hundreds, maybe thousands, of client lockers.”

She thought about for a moment. “Well, probably not to the extent that you have. I don’t have your access to the architecture.”

“No, that’s different. I can see all the files, sure. I know how they’re organized and how to optimize the data flow, but I work on a macro level, with categories of files rather than individual client packets. I really don’t know the data.”

“Okay, I see what you’re saying. What did you want to ask me?”

“Based on your experience with the data, if you were going to steal something from one of the archives, what would it be?”

“I don’t think that’s a very polite question.”

“I’m serious. It has to do with this problem I’m working on.”

“It would have to be something small,” she said after a time. “Something that wouldn’t be easily missed.”

Dorian waved her off. “Forget that. Let’s assume that the size of the file is irrelevant. You’ve worked out a mechanism for moving files of any size off the network without tipping off security. What would you go after?”

“Thelonious Beck.” She didn’t even miss a beat. “Oh yeah, it would be Beck.”

“The rock star?”

“Section 14, Sector 121, Locker 9.” She winked at him. “I loaded some of his college poetry about six months ago. Beautiful, lascivious, outrageous stuff. Very sexy. He was prepping for a zap to New Holyoke. That’s where they’re recording his new gig. He transmitted a core update right before he left. Mmm, a complete wet package backup, just to be safe. He was so fresh in the locker, you could almost smell his sweat.”

“You would steal a rock star?”

“Sure. Sanitize it, upload it into my personal cache. Can you imagine?”

“No. All right, let’s not imagine. Stick with me here.” Dorian rubbed his eyes again, trying to clear his thoughts. “This is the complete Masonic Archive and Infocache, purported to be the largest, most secure, most important library of arcana in the entire universe, and you’re going to go after a rock star rather than, say, the truth behind the Whiston Murders or the Archae Stoddard Conspiracy?”

Amara rolled her eyes. “What for? Who cares about a bunch of people who have been dead for a hundred and fifty years? I think you’ve been playing secret security agent for too long, John. Most people don’t care about what dox might or might not be in our lockers. They’re much more into things that are relevant to them, things that they think we’re hiding that would benefit the world. Did you know that word on the Strand is that we’ve got a copy of Federico Franzetti’s death package? Some people believe that we’ve buried it in cold storage and won’t release it to his family because it proves definitively that Heaven and Hell are just myths and the Roman Catholic church is paying us to suppress it. That’s what people are interested in. They want something they can experience, something meaningful.”

“Like Thelonious Beck?”

“Oh, we’d be happy for a long time, his package and I.”

“Do we really have Franzetti’s death upload?”

Amara curled her lip in derision. “The techs pulled the plug on him when he went into cardiac arrest. Such a shame. For all the fuss, he was a very uninteresting man.”

He had no idea if she was being serious. She was as inscrutable as a balloon animal.

“How many other celebrities do we have in lockers?”

“Oh, thousands at least. Hundreds of thousands if you count the politicians. Nelson James is here. Ryan Stevenson, the soccer player. That poet Penberthy. The former commissioner of baseball…Simon something. Everyone who had a Masonic connection. Some of their wives.”

Boom.

“What about scientists?”

“Sure.”

“Like who?”

“Colm Freeny, for one. The guy who found the cure for cortical flash. Christopher Taute, the astrobiologist.”

“What about Michael Raville? Is he here?”

“The father of zap? Sort of.”

“How can he only be sort of here?” His pulse suddenly thundered in his ears. “He’s either here or he’s not.”

Unless portions of his package had been raided. Stolen. Otherwise corrupted.

“There’s an old copy of him down on the lower levels. I mean really old, from back in the days when they were still working out the details of upload theory. It’s a complete waste, they tell me. He’d had none of his genetic predisps purged, and there were still skips in the signal because the technology was so unrefined It’s a really rough cut, not something he ever wanted to build on, but one of the science foundations bequeathed it to the Archive as a historical treasure. Because it was one of the first, I guess, and because of who he is.”

Dorian’s hands wanted to shake; they always did when he got too excited. He gripped the top of the cubicle wall to steady them. “About how long ago was that, do you think?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Forty years or so.”

Of course.

“Are you going to tell me why this is so important?” she asked.

“It’s Raville,” he said, and dropped into geek.

He located himself in the Archive’s Library System, a useful office render for locating files quickly. The space presented as a classic metropolitan library with large clear windows, sound absorptive carpets and row upon row of carefully organized card catalogue drawers. They were the old fashioned kind, brief descriptions and quantum addresses typewritten on yellowed index cards. The whole place smelled of dust and quietly decaying paper. Late afternoon sunlight perpetually slanted through the window glass, warm and vivid with dancing, insectile motes.

He went to the ‘R’ stack, found the right drawer and began picking through the cards.

Ryoku appeared beside him. “You’re very rude, Mr. Dorian.”

He kept thumbing. “I’m sorry, Amara. I just…I needed to find something out.”

And there it was. Raville, Michael. Complete Cortical Package Upload (damaged, historical). Rel. North American States Research and Defense Agency Laboratories, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Great Appalachian Clave. NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE EVEN ON DEATH. Big letters, red felt pen, in case he had been tempted to miss it. Below that were file sizes, ip coordinates, schema details.

And the acquisition date: 19-May-2385

“The same date,” he said, dull with shock. “Forty-two years ago, almost to the day.”

“The same date as what, John?”

With difficulty, he tore his eyes away from the card and looked at her. “The same date the spider began mining our network. Raville brought it in with him.”

She blinked her impossibly large eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“The spider has been stealing data from the network for more than forty years. What I couldn’t figure out was why. See, the Archive has only been in operation a little longer than that, and in the beginning, it was really nothing more than just a small to middling data depot in the unofficial and unregulated chain of Masonic Lodge networks that had developed in the mid to late ‘70’s to provide technical storage capacity for both corporate and private documents. It was all homegrown, self-supported applications at first, but became increasingly tech savvy out of necessity, as the less sturdy Lodge networks failed. By the turn of the century, it had consolidated most of those networks onto its servers, and eventually became the defacto technical arm of Freemasonry and its appendant organizations.”

He was reeling, trying to encompass all of it. That had been in the early days of the phenomenalist revolution, about the time the creaky old Web had finally evolved into the Strand. About that time, someone had figured out that data storage and processing procedures–most of the brute force work of computing itself, in fact–could be shoved into quantum foam, where the massive calculations could be carried out seemingly instantly if they were executed in a parallel metaverse whose Schrödinger waveform collapses could be accurately mathematically predicted. Someone else added the (relatively) simple system of cursory triggers signals that could not only predict, but manipulate the collapses in such a way that computational processing could occur coincident with the desired outcome, the reverberations of which could be available instantaneously everywhere at once.

What this really meant was that well-meaning scientists had inadvertently hacked the universe and determined a method for encoding digital data signals into the very mind of God. The quantum structure of reality opened up into something like thirty-eight alternate dimensions, plus infinite recursive potential states, all of which were theoretically vast, empty and free for the taking.

The ultimate fallout was that all of the data artifacts ever generated in the history of human experience could be effectively simulated and stored in the space of a grain of mustard seed.

Which was sort of mind-boggling and notoriously hard to navigate effectively without a whole laboratory loaded with specialized equipment and a team of hard-headed quantum physicists around to back you up. The universe was awash in data. People already had more data than they could stand. What they craved was information. Data in action; data with purpose.

Which meant pornography, of course.

Ubiquitous triple-X pornapalooza on demand. That was where the funding came from. All it needed to really explode was a delivery mechanism.

It was corneal-cochlear-neural-array implants that finally brought the revolution of quantum computing to the public and with it, for all practical purposes, the death of physical data storage. That meant libraries, museums, archives, university collections. All of it. They were dust. Analyze an item, break it down to its component parts, map it, digitize it, upload it. Make it available to everyone. No need to travel to Washington if you wanted to see a copy of the Constitution. No reason to visit Sydney to see the opera house. Why fly all the way to France to see Versailles when you could tour it virtually, perfectly, individually with all the attendant sense response of actual experience? Geek translated it all into digits and stored it in the air you breathed and the ground you walked. Information wanted to be free, and by God, mankind had set it free. There were no limits to the things we could know now that we could index, catalogue and analyze the complete sum of human experience.

Then had come zap, and all the rules changed for everyone, for all time.

It was supposed to usher in the Golden Age of Man.

Until somebody finally realized that maybe having their Final Will and Testament floating about on the ether for any savvy and curious-minded jack kid to download might not be such a good idea. The same with personal home movies, copyrighted television programs, porn, porn and more porn. Add in stock listings, bank statements, credit card numbers, love letters from that old mistress and suddenly you had an entire social construct on the verge of a personal privacy crisis. It was all just data in the end.

Data, as they had said, wanted to be free. And while that might be good for data, it was disastrous for privacy, for business, for a whole bunch of marriages. Some data, people began to agree, should probably not be so free as other data. So the governments, who had their own interests in restricting access to certain bits and bytes, stepped in and started cutting up the metaverse into proprietary chunks the way they had once chopped up outer space: keeping the good bits for themselves, selling off the moderate bits to galaxy-spanning megacorps and doling out the crummy leftovers to regular joes at exorbitant rates. Private corps, various shareholder enclaves and fraternal orgs emerged to allow the regular joes to pitch their pennies together and set up Archives to manage their own slices of infinity or sub-lease slices of slices in the new data economy. Data lockers of the soul, essentially.

By the time of the big data boom, the Archive had already been neatly placed to expand into this brand new arena of data support services. Being tucked safely out of the way on the absolute borders of known space turned out to be more politically expedient than it was technologically inconvenient for a surprising number of people who didn’t feel like being increasingly subjected to onerous governmental regulations. Or people who wanted to hide things in a secure data haven that wouldn’t be under the jurisdiction of assorted terrestrial courts, public agencies or military tribunals.

Dorian felt as though his eyes must be as large as Ryoku’s now. “That’s why there was no bounce point. Raville didn’t need a bounce. He was already inside.”

Because of zap. Zap was going to change everything, but before he unleashed an unproven technology on the world, Raville had to test it on something more precious than his dog, Barney, the first living being ever zapped from Points A to B (and everywhere in between).

Packaging was the technology that allowed you to digitize everything, even your immortal soul, if you could afford the hack. Store it away for a rainy day (or an untimely death). Back it up, put security on it, seal it off from prying eyes. The storage and recovery of the digital human essence had been a relatively new field of study when Raville was developing zap. It was supposed to be disaster recovery, the modern cryogenics for a technological age. The experts who had designed the mechanism didn’t even know if it would work, much less Raville himself. But he had it done just in case. Just in case something went horribly wrong with zap and he was destroyed, atom by atom and scattered across the space-time continuum. Just in case, he had backed himself up, and then left the copy to digitally moulder on some dustiy military-industrial SAN.

In the meantime, the Archive had emerged as convenient and cost effective storage for the various personal libraries, legal documents and private musings of Master Masons and their attendant Lodges large and small, all over God’s creation. Later it added space to hold completely immersive memory strings for virtual replay. Eventually it was whole Master Masons themselves–digitized doppelgangers and their lifetimes of mental, emotional and, in some cases, physical baggage, all broken down to their fundamental elements and immortalized in Schrödinger waveforms, drowned in foam as dislocated phantoms haunting the metaverse. The Archive had space aplenty, a reputation for discretion and an impeccable history of data integrity and maintenance. What better place than the Archive to store the one and only original copy of a living god?

He pulled himself back from the logical precipice he had been contemplating. What was he really thinking here? Was he, John Dorian, seriously considering the possibility that his network was being jacked not to get at Michael Raville, but by Michael Raville, the Father of Zap himself? Why? What did they have that Michael Raville could possibly want or could not obtain by other, saner, less potentially reputation devastating means? What, in short, was going on here?

Dorian thought for just a moment that he might vomit, if such a thing was possible in geek.

“You think someone tried to crack the Archive steal at Raville’s package?” Amara asked.

“I’m not sure what I think,” he responded, and flipped out of geek.

But he would know soon enough.

When he had oriented himself again, desk and chair and office space, he plugged back into his terminal and brought up his workbench session. It was well after midnight. He was too tired to think about Raville, about the spider and what all it might mean any more this evening, so he zipped up the spider, the port archive, and his personal notes on the deconstruction and shunted them off into his private foam where he could access them at will. He shut down his terminal and grabbed his coat off the back of his chair.

“I don’t have the energy to deal with this anymore tonight.” Or the courage, the clarity, or any of the other gut-check virtues he would need to tackle an investigation this explosive. “I’m going to swing by Checo’s on my way home, if you’d like to come along.”

He couldn’t tell if she was stunned or pleased by the offer. “Why Mr. Dorian, are you offering to walk me home?”

He considered her powerful reptilian jawline and fierce, chitinous claws. “I was actually thinking that you might walk me home.”

She laughed, then marked her place and closed the book. “Let me grab my jacket.”

They left the building by a vaulted entryway off the first floor lobby, skirted the flowering fountain in the courtyard outside and passed through the iron gates that defended the outer wall. It was an exact replica of its render in geek. Sturdy limestone, high and wide windows opening on pleasant galleries with floors of native wood, the massive Templar Rotunda in the center. Security passed them through without checking their ids. Dorian frequently kept odd hours.

The night was clear and cold, and Dorian shivered in his jacket. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets, searching for warmth, but finding little. His breath plumed from his nostrils as jets of steam. Most of the streetlights along the Rue de St. John were out, which wasn’t uncommon, and he could see the bright stars overhead. The Lesser Moon rode low in the sky, fat and pendulous, and beyond it the thick band of the Milky Way flowed across the west like a bank of mist rising over the mountains. They walked in the middle of the street, away from the alleys and whatever might be lurking there. Most of the buildings that bordered the Archive were dark, many of them in serious states of decline. Some of them had boarded their windows over, abandoned for the long haul, while others simply sat empty, gaping, looking in the shadows like abandoned tombs. But here and there the red lights of security cameras tracked their movement. They tripped the Universal Commerce Bank’s motion sensor and its portable spotlights tracked them from the guard shack until they were out of range. The night watchman, Karl, waved as they passed. Dorian waved back, but didn’t feel like stopping to exchange pleasantries tonight.

There was a smatter of gunfire to the north, but it was several blocks distant, so he didn’t let it bother him.

Amara strode beside him, her head almost on a level with his, and he was considered to be of above average height. She bounded forward with lithe and powerful strides. Each step was quick and sharp, like the preface to an assault. This mod had a stirring sort of grace, he had to admit, even if it wasn’t exactly to his taste.

“I’m sorry,” Dorian said to her. “I imagine you’re freezing.”

“I’m fine. I had them weave microfiber thermal coils under the scales, in case the weather turned.” She hadn’t even bothered to button her coat. Her chest glistened with condensation, and in places, her scales steamed in the chill air.

“That’s handy,” he said.

“It’s a nice augmentation. I kept the Mi-Go night vision, and some of the musculature enhancements.” She looked up at him. “You know, if you’re going to insist on keeping these hours, you should get something yourself. Kevlar weaving around the skull and vital organs at least.”

“I try to avoid contributing to the arms race,” he said, shrugging. “I’m a firm believer in the theory that the harder I work to keep someone from killing me at random, the more effort they put into devising weapons that will contravene all known defenses. I’ve opted out of the madness. If someone wants to kill me, they’ll find a way to do it regardless of my best efforts.”

“That sounds like the voice of experience.”

“Not really. I just have better uses for my money than preventative maintenance.” So she wouldn’t think he had a death wish or was otherwise insane, he added, “I take full advantage of the company plan. I backup every week.”

She understood, and her eyes widened. “Are you telling me that’s your original mod?”

“Does that surprise you?” He could see from her body language that she was forcibly resisting the automatic urge to touch his arm, verify his reality.

She looked away, as though he had embarrassed her. “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone still in their original package,” she whispered, sounding awed. “Well, not since I was a child, anyway.”

“It’s not that hideous, is it?”

“No, not at all. I just meant–”

Dorian squeezed her shoulder gently. “I know what you meant. It’s okay.”

People were invariably surprised that he still had the skin he’d been born with. He had some scars, and bum knee from an old basketball injury that acted up in the damp, but he had a clean bill of health otherwise and no obvious genetic defects, though his proclivity for Parkinson’s and sundry other degenerative neural conditions would become worrisome once he got into his sixties. And it wasn’t like he was pure seed. He had the standard synaptic microtubule parallel-prox, a mish-mash of perceptive upgrades for orientation switching, the full cognitive drilling protocol. But when it came to his physical incarnation, he’d just never seen any reason to complain about the ten fingers and ten toes nature had dealt him.

“I’m on my third corpse,” Amara said.

“Ah, intrepid galactic traveler?” Dorian grinned.

“Bad neighborhood.” Which, he thought, explained a few things about her choice of augmentations, and her determined androgyny. She went on, “You think differently about the utility of modding after the first time.”

“Let’s just hope that isn’t any time soon.”

The streets remained empty for several more blocks. As they neared the city center, traffic picked up and a cop flashed his lights at them and ordered them off the road. There were more streetlamps here, better atmosphere. Fewer of the structures were so obvious in the way they sagged. A robotic sweep shushed past them, spraying the sidewalk with sand and grit. At least it was making an effort.

A few people were still out, traveling gaggles of young professionals, more cops, hookers and pushers. A great number of them were mods. Tall and gossamer winged fairies like Ferrier paintings. Slick, leathered Yakuza samurai. A minotaur or three (must be a fad). Interspersed among the more radical mods, there was plated nano-woven dermals, lugubriously caricatured musculature, retractable bladeworks, any of a dozen standard augmentation packages readily available for purchase to the aspiring trans-human. The crowd traveled in knots of smiles and ridiculous laughter and the general ecstatic hubris of a youth hammered through the peghole of geek. Beautiful, customized people in a beautiful, customized world.

They steered down a side street and back into less affluent districts. The structures here were largely featureless, cinderblock squares. Most had tin roofs and faded, peeling paint. The windows were dark, and the chill wind moaned through the streets around them, giving the whole neighborhood an air of emptiness. What it really looked like, Dorian thought, was a public reclamation project, or the temporary Quonset shacks stuck up for shelter in a war zone. But in geek, they rendered as glittering Colonials, nineteenth century carriage houses, the occasional Cape Cod. Neatly cut lawns, picket fences, apple pies cooling on the windowsills–steadfastly middle class stuff.

It was the difference between Sonali Real, where he lived, and Sonali Virtual, which contained nearly everyone else.

They crossed the street and stepped up to the front door of Checo’s. It was just another plain structure in the monotonous wall of cinderblock constructions, indistinguishable from the shops and houses around it except that it was a bit larger and strung with gay strands of Christmas lights in the wide bay window beside the front door. A doorman sat outside on a metal folding chair, puffing on a cigar and shivering in his heavy overcoat. He rose to greet them.

“You don’t want to go in there, Mr. Dorian,” he said, shaking his head. “Trust me on this. It’s a madhouse.”

“I’ve got a craving for curry, Charlie, and I won’t be denied.”

The doorman shrugged his broad shoulders. “Hey, it’s your neck. You don’t make it out of there alive, don’t blame me.”

Amara peered into the window. “What’s going on?”

“Poetry night. Open mic.” Charlie shook his head. “Brings out all the freaks.”

“It does look pretty crowded,” Dorian allowed. He tilted his head to Amara. “Take out?”

“Go pick up your order. I’ll wait out here.”

“I haven’t actually ordered yet. I have to do that at the counter.” Charlie opened the door for them, and they stepped inside. Dorian grimaced in apology. “I should have mentioned it beforehand.”

Amara looked up at him uncertainly. “I’ve never been here before.”

“It’ll just take a few minutes.”

Just as Charlie had promised, the dining room was crowded with too many tables wedged into too little area. The air was stuffy and oppressive from densely packed bodies and the excess heat from dozens of flickering candles. The conversation wasn’t so much a jubilant buzz as it was a chaotic roar of odd accents and coarse, shouted laughter. But it also smelled powerfully of onions, garlic, basil. Absolutely intoxicating. Dorian took Amara’s hand and wove through the maze of protruding chairs, gesticulating arms and unfamiliar faces. The counter was in the back, set up against the doors to the kitchen. Checo himself, a short, dark man in a white shirt and smart black trousers waited on them, smiling and nodding.

He had to shout to make himself heard. “Good to see you, John.”

“Looks like you’ve got your hands full tonight.”

“It’s been worse. I’m not complaining.” He turned away from them and bawled their order into the kitchen. Someone they couldn’t see repeated it in answer. “Maybe twenty minutes, okay?”

“Okay?” Dorian asked Amara. In the flickering candle flame, her scales shimmered like burnished bronze. She nodded her assent.

“John will introduce us properly, of course,” Checo said to her, winking, “if we remind him.”

“Amara Cain. Checo.”

“Pleasure,” she said.

“Out for the evening? Pleasant atmosphere, good food, good company–so, you think Checo’s? Obvious, yes? Johnny here, he knows how to show a girl a good time. Munisca in braccio, attraversante il mondo reale. Is there anything better?”

“Work,” Dorian countered.

“Ah.”

They waited. One of the would-be poets climbed up onto the temporary stage Checo had arranged in the far corner of the dining room and mumbled several dozen lines into the microphone. Something about angst and embracing consciousness and black helicopters. It was awkward.

Checo rolled his eyes. “Two more hours, I promised them. Crazy bastards. All they want to do is sit and drink and yap their heads off. Eh, at least they bring a good mob with them.”

A bell rang and one of the busboys brought out their food in a box tied up with string. Dorian paid with a debit coupon, and they made their way back outside just as the next hopeful Shakespeare worked up the courage to attack the crowd.

When they had put a block or two behind them, Amara whispered, “What was that place?”

“Checo’s? Around here, we call it a restaurant. An Italian restaurant, or at least Italian themed, if you want to be technical.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He had seen her in there, blinking frenetically, flipping rapidly back and forth between geek and mundane. Like someone on the verge of panic.

“Real food. Real atmosphere,” Dorian said.

“It was weird. A complete wasteland.”

In geek, she meant.

“Checo’s grandfather, Norberto, was first generation Sonali. His family shipped with Chrysostum and the set-up crew on the Icarus, back in the days before the zap. It took them eighteen months to get here from the closest settlement. Relativity stretched that to almost twenty-five years Terran. He started with a hand drawn greengrocers cart, fixing sandwiches for transit laborers at the construction sites almost eighty years ago. When he’d had enough of that, he built the restaurant. They’ve been there ever since. The Checo clan is very proud of who they are and where they came from. Layering a render over it would cheapen them, and their family history with it; a history which has largely played out inside those same walls. That’s the only way I can explain it to you.”

“That’s why I’d never heard of it,” Amara mused, thoughtful. “It doesn’t show up in geek. The renders around it overlap. Hiding in plain sight.”

“They’re not hiding. Checo is just traditional.”

“And all of those other people in there? None of them even had their avatars booted. They were completely off the Strand.”

“They respect Checo’s wishes. I don’t see why that’s hard to understand.”

“And you don’t find it a little suspicious?”

“What?”

” For God’s sake, John, they could be doing anything while they’re off the Strand, and no one would know it.”

“Mmm. Nefarious activities like digestion and poetry. You’re right. Someone should put a stop to it before they bring the whole culture down with them.”

“It’s anti-social.”

“Of course it is. That’s the whole point.”

Dorian stepped off the wide street and steered left, past the slag yards that piled around the old foundry. The breeze had fallen off, and low clouds were beginning to gather overhead. The side road quickly turned to gravel, then hard pounded dirt that looked both gray and barren in the moonlight. They hurried along the fence line, through a mostly vacant district of slab houses, many of which had fallen in on themselves. At the crest of the hill, they came to Dorian’s front gate. Quiksand was a coffin community. Four spiraling superstructures interconnected with plastisheen skywalks above, a public infotainment area in the mutual lobby, all the modern amenities. Two thousand units, a like number of occupants, most of them strangers. A four meter wall topped with motion sensors and shockwires surrounded the complex.

Dorian flashed over his tenant id, and the gate swept aside with a hydraulic hum.

“Nice,” Amara said out of the side of her mouth. “I see where you spend all that money you save on self defense.”

“I like the view.” He scanned the brooding skyline as it filled with ponderous clouds. “It’s going to rain. You should come up for awhile. Until it passes, I mean.” Dorian rattled the contents of the carry out bag and smiled. “Anyway, I don’t think I can eat all this curry by myself, and Checo would kill me if he thought I had let it go to waste.”

“I suppose I can’t in good conscience refuse an offer like that,” she said, and her laughter tinkled like the song of a night bird. “Lead on, kind sir.”

<– Chapter 1 / Chapter 3 –>

<– Chapter 2 / Chapter 4 –>

Amara stood in the corner, windows on either side, and peered out into the night as the rain began to tick against the glass, forty-two stories above the rumpled and crumbling cityscape of Sonali Real. Dorian busied himself in the kitchen, heaping curried chicken and snow peas onto plates and trying to track down where his clean silverware might be. When he found everything he needed, he carried the food and bottles of beer around the island bar that separated the two rooms and set everything on the black lacquered coffee table in front of the sofa.

“You were right about the view,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s fantastic.”

“It’s a little deceiving,” Dorian said. “The glass is focus-oriented line of sight telescopic with a range periphery good to about forty kilometers. The surface microsensors read and correlate your focal and optical depth profile, then adjust the image according to complex pattern analysis algorithms. They’re pretty good, but it can get clunky at times, especially with non-standard optical nodes. You’ll see what I mean if you try to shift from near to distant objects too quickly.”

“I was just enjoying the view.”

For just a moment there, he’d almost slipped out of his secret identity and exposed himself as Super Dork.

“Oh, right. They’re good for that, too.”

The distant mountains to the west were black, more dense shadows than distinct formations, but following the line of the nearer foothills south and east, one could see the jubilant, vibrant, shimmering lights of New Sonali Southrange in the distance. Traffic flowed smoothly on the I-9 circle, though from this distance, it appeared to crawl along in a steady, everlasting stream like a foraging party of luminous insects. The twin beacons flashing atop the Mauripon Towers swung back and forth like erratic antennae tasting the leading edge of the approaching storm. In the center of all the light and energy and primetime hyperactivity, sat the massive concrete carcass of the assembler station and zap depot. The Queen. The source of being for ten million immediate settlers and the unnumbered thousands beyond scattered throughout the towns and villages which pockmarked the mountains between the Sonali plain and Tarn Ferry on the lee side of the continental backbone.

It was twenty-five kilometers through the air to Southrange, and a much longer and more ambitious journey otherwise. One of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, Dorian had often thought. Zap, nano-assembler stations, the end of want. They had all been heady promises once. Except there were some new and funky physics involved, things no one was certain they properly understood. Potent stuff, quantum data encoding. Ankara happened just about the time Sonali lined up in the queue, and though the land immediately surrounding Ankara had been reclaimed in only a decade or so by specially engineered nanozymes, the town fathers of Sonali didn’t feel like they had the twenty-eight million lives to spare that Earth did, so they’d put a safe buffer between themselves and the assembler station. Twenty-five kilometers and a low bank of foothills, in fact. The radius of a serious blast and subsequent nano-contamination zone.

These had been the unintended consequences: New Sonali Southrange flourished, feeding off the free flow of new and modern goods, while Old Sonali, Sonali Real, wasted away like an infirm and slightly mad grandparent, home to a staggered manufacturing base, government offices and other shameful family secrets.

Dorian edged up beyond Amara’s shoulder and shared the view for a few moments. “Can you see your building from here?”

She turned her attention from the glittering lights of Southrange, and traced her finger over the wreckage of malformed darkness and indistinct abutments that formed their own city. After a moment, she tapped the glass just above the Landgrant Office downtown. The spotlights on the dome and the rain obscured much of the details surrounding it, and there were too few streetlamps for finding better landmarks.

“Over there,” she said. “But you can’t see it. It’s just a three story walk-up on Braston. Nothing like this. It must cost you a fortune.”

“It’s not as bad as you might think,” he said. He didn’t know why it should make him feel awkward. She must spend a likewise fortune on mod salons and firmware upgrades, but somehow his apartment felt like the more conspicuous consumption, looking down on such an expansive panorama of social decline. “The building went up in the wake of the prosperity that followed the zap. The developers guessed there would be a housing boom as the new economy worked itself out. Right idea; wrong location. The Hab Co-op bought it outright about five years ago. The Archive pulled some strings and got me in as part of my recruitment package.”

It was a decent enough space. The windows were what had sold him on the place, a way to look out on the world he called home. He’d added the carpets, rehung most of the walls, paid top dollar for handmade furniture and his assorted entertainment gadgets. The spiral-grained Famen cabinets in the kitchen were his own work, as were the bureaus and tables he kept stashed in the bedroom and den where no one would see his long and torturous progression from novice woodworker to master craftsman.

“You shouldn’t call it a coffin.” Amara broke away from him and paced about the living room, studying his prints and pictures and other accreted junks. “It’s lovely, John.”

“My sister did most of the decorating.” He didn’t have a sister, of course.

“It’s very comfortable here.” She settled onto the couch gently, cautiously, as though afraid that her tough scales might damage the soft leather cushions. “But I think I expected that, somehow.”

Dorian sat beside her. He popped the caps on two of the beer bottles and handed one to Amara. “I’m really very crusty. This is just my narcissistic and self-coddling side drawn out to its logical conclusion.”

Amara gazed up at him with her wide and alien eyes. “You’re oddly complicated for a luddite.”

“Hey, thanks. I think.” He took his plate and began to eat. “Do you want to watch the newswire? I’ve got a projection unit wired into the Strand.” Unaccountably, he felt himself flushing. “Microprism nano-pixels. Um, embedded in the wall tiles.”

She laughed. “And in other ways, you are so typically male.”

“Should I apologize for that?”

“It’s nothing you could help anyway. But I don’t really want to watch the newswire. There’s never anything on it but bad news and celebrity sightings.” She took her plate into her lap and nestled into the sofa. “You could put on some music. I wouldn’t mind that. I’m enjoying the rustic experience. It’s almost like camping out.”

Dorian did a quick, five second scour of the Strand, found something that looked interesting enough and piped the streamjack through his quadro system. The sound was warm, acoustic, slightly Meni-Taurian in flavor. Not his style, but it wasn’t completely hideous.

“The Mongrel Tongue,” Amara said, nodding. “I love this one.”

“Beck, yes?”

“The very same. Thank you.”

They sat quietly for several minutes, eating, listening. Dorian caught himself tapping his foot in rhythm to the melody and made himself stop. If Amara noticed, she had the good breeding not to point it out to him. When they were finished with dinner, he collected the plates and utensils and carried them into the sink. He returned with more beer.

Amara took a fresh bottle from him and shifted to the corner of the couch with her knees drawn up to her chest. Outside, the wind whistled sharply and the rain began to fall in earnest.

“Can I ask you a personal question, John?”

“As long as I don’t have to give a personal answer. I keep a list of pre-scripted public answers printed up on index cards in the other room, though. You’re welcome to those.” She wasn’t smiling. He took a hit from his beer. “Okay, go ahead.”

“What is it with you and geek? You’re so, I don’t know, contemptuous of it sometimes. I notice it at work, of course, but even here at home, with your resonant sound system, your microprism nano-pixels, all of this space you don’t need. You could geek a far superior sense experience at a fraction of the cost if you’d just leave your Strand session up, but you haven’t done that, and I don’t think that you ever would. You wouldn’t substitute a render for this, no matter how much money it saved you. You’ve embraced the reality. Don’t get me wrong, it is a splendid reality, John. I just can’t help but ask myself why. Why would anyone surround themselves with so much unnecessary tangible experience? It’s like you’ve intentionally chosen to cut yourself off from the rest of humanity. You live in this bubble of mediated experience that no one else has access to.”

“You call this mediated experience? I don’t know how to break it to you, baby doll, but this is the way humans have been hacking civilization out of the jungle of interpersonal relationships for a few thousand years now. A dry cave, a cheery fire and scintillating conversation was all our ancestors hoped for.”

“Once upon a time, sure. But the Strand has changed that. Zap and uploading, too. We don’t have to settle for the reality we’ve been handed, we can make whatever reality we choose—make it, and then share that vision with those around us. We’ve broken down the barricades that separate people from one another and begun to unlock our true creative potential.” She hesitated, as though worried she might have offended him. “Except for a few diehards like you, I mean, people who don’t want to live inside the circle of communal experience.”

Dorian shrugged. “I’ve got eyes that see and ears that hear. Why confuse that clarity with the echoes and interpretations of a billion other people’s ‘visions’ and overlapping sense experiences? I’m confident in my own ability to draw conclusions and make decisions. And I certainly don’t crave the constant external validation that you Strand-o-philes seem to.”

“Oh, no, John Dorian. I’m not letting you off that easy. You can’t dismiss the mass cultural migration to phenomenalist interaction as the aberration here. It’s what the human experience—the real experience—has become. You can’t argue with the culture.”

“And you’re advising me to hurry up and drink the Kool-Aid, is that it?”

“Not at all. I just wonder what you’re so afraid of.”

“Bzzt. I’m going to have to dismiss that argument as a non sequitur conclusion derived from a sub-cultural bias. Besides that, who says I’m afraid of anything? I’m not the one sticking my head in the digital sand because the world around me is a big piece of crap. I’m the one out there walking the streets morning and night, talking with real people and facing real personal hazards. In my unmodified native form, no less. I’m out there every day engaging the reality everyone else is ducking, thank you very much.”

Amara arched a suspicious eyebrow. “O weary reality surfer, answer me this question then: what are your neighbors’ names?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“You’ve lived in this apartment for five years and you don’t know the names of your neighbors, do you?”

He grunted in annoyance. “So that just makes me a bad neighbor. What’s your point?”

“My point is that you’ve largely rejected the interactive and socially immersive experience of the Strand, but you haven’t replaced it with anything. You’re just as disdainful of face-to-face human contact as you are peer-to-peer.”

“Hello, I’m a programming dork, Amara. We’re not exactly known for our social acumen.”

“Don’t hide behind clichés.”

“I’m not hiding. I just happen to like the quiet life. I like the way I live. It makes me happy.”

She frowned at his intransigence. “That’s not an answer, and you know it.”

“What does it matter? Am I hurting someone not staying plugged into the Strand all day, every day?” It really wasn’t the question she was asking, and he knew it. But he didn’t expect her to understand him, either. Sitting here in the soft white lights of his coffin, thrice-resurrected from backup, integrally augmented, so experimental with her physical mod that she probably didn’t even know what she looked like anymore, she was asking what was wrong with him. Where did one even begin to look for common ground?

At last, he said, “I like thinking my own thoughts and reaching my own conclusions.”

“And you think that the Strand interferes with that?”

“When we confuse the tool with the work, yes it does. Look, I love the Strand. I love the access to information, the ready interface with like minds floating out there on the aether, the ability to expand my horizons and learn about what it’s like to live a life in a place I would never otherwise be able to experience. Everything anyone could ever want is out there. But that’s the problem with it, too. Absolutely everything is out there. It’s a constant cacophony. Everyone’s thoughts, everyone’s opinions, everyone’s public face. These insanely pedantic demagogueries that’re all process and no outcome–it’s paralyzing.”

“Paralyzing how?”

“Volume for one. Complexity.”

“I don’t follow.” She grimaced. “I’m sorry if I’m prying. I’m just trying to understand. Your life fascinates me.”

He wasn’t sure how to take that exactly. Was she saying he’d stepped so far outside the circle that he now qualified as a sociological oddity?

Dorian sighed, but he couldn’t refuse to answer her, despite the lateness of the hour. He had invited her up, after all, and the host had certain responsibilities to his guests. He had, in other words, adopted this stray cat completely of his own volition.

“You want to know my biggest objection to the Strand and the whole social milieu that comes with it? Here it is: On the Strand, it’s all been done before. Whatever it is that I want to do, want to be, want to discover–somebody has already been there, learned it, uploaded their conclusions on the matter. That’s where the paralysis comes from, and it infects all of us. We’ve stopped thinking about things, caring about things, or God forbid, actually taking some form of action when we see things that strike us as wrong. It’s so much easier to just tune your sessions to filter out the things you don’t like. And why should we think about troubling issues? There’s no reason to unless you’ve got some startling new insight to offer, which you don’t since fourteen billion other people have already mulled it over before you, most of them with Doctor in front of their names and an academic alphabet soup behind it. They’re certainly not going to take your input seriously. The only people who will, in fact, are the nutcases and trailer trash harpies and jerk-off home study philosophers who hold forth on the boondock bulletin boards.”

“Don’t you think you’re being awfully cynical?” Amara asked. “The Strand has allowed people to come into contact with information and experiences they never would have been able to access before. It’s liberated us from the narrow perspectives of our own native culture pockets.”

“Sure, we have all sorts of facts at our disposal, but do we ever come to actually know anything new from them? Do most of us ever try to do anything constructive with the knowledge we’ve gleaned, or are we content to just sit back and experience a vicarious triDvid render of what someone else already did with it? All the knowledge in the universe is worthless if we’re not stepping outside our custom made bubbles of filtered reality and doing something constructive with it. Which, once again, we wouldn’t ever do, because whatever constructive thing you may want to do could be or has already been much more ably be done by someone more qualified. The Strand has made us richer in data, but poorer in spirit. That’s all I’m saying.

“Take something simple like, oh, for example that encephalitis epidemic in Eudora that’s been in the news lately. A billion people out there are calling on the regional health organizations to do something, to zap them a scheme for some standard anti-virals. Another billion people argue that if they can’t pay, then they’ve got no right to the treatment, human compassion be damned. They point out, quite correctly, that the new manufacturing economy is based almost solely on licensing royalties derived from proprietary schemes. If somebody decides that we should just skip the royalties on some schemes for the public good, what does that mean for people and the congloms whose function in our society and our economy is to destruct objects into digitized schemes? I’ll tell you what happens: they take it hard where it counts, in their bank books and they start exploring other career options. They have no motivation to work for free, after all. And for every one of them who can’t turn a profit, fewer schemes get made. When you start looking at it that way, you start to say to yourself that everybody has got to make a living after all, so maybe it’s actually in the public interest to just let those miners die. They suffer, sure, and it’s tragic and all that, but the rest of us have to forge ahead. Things continue to be destructed, more goods become available at cheaper prices, and the zap economy continues to flourish, which ultimately raises the standard of living for everyone.

“So where do we draw the line? All medicine is free? There goes the vested interests of pharmacological R&D’s, not to mention their revenue streams, which eventually has real consequences on our ability to fight future diseases. And if we’re going to give free meds, shouldn’t we include food, too? That’s maybe even more important than medical schemes to a lot of struggling colonies. I mean, isn’t access to food a fundamental human right? Surely we can all agree on that. Well, once you start down that humanitarian slippery slope, then we have to talk about construction materials for basic housing. Or how about clothing? Each one of those is another argument. Each one is potentially an industry out of work. It’s easy to think altruistic thoughts when those thoughts don’t cost you anything.

“Fine, then. Let’s imagine that as a human community we actually manage to generate the political will to take the situation these miners are in seriously. Somebody digs through all the arguments, catalogues all of these positions that have been put forward by people who don’t have any stake in the lives of these miners and somehow manages to come up with a consensus opinion We collectively decide that Something Has Got to Be Done. Then you’ve got a whole new bunch of worms to try to cram back into can. What exactly are you going to do? How are you going to do it? What are the potential ramifications of this precedent setting involvement? That’s where the real fight starts, because then the ‘experts’ weigh in with historical precedents. How fixing the AIDS crisis led to overpopulation and ecological collapse in sub-Saharan Africa in the twenty-first century. How the Black Death stunted the technological development of Western Europe by a hundred years. How the Garow Root Famine directly contributed to the democratization of New Canton and the downfall of the Shen-Tse regime. And every time you think you’ve accounted for all of those historical events with some important similarity to this one, another one pops up, because everything is out there on the Strand, just waiting to become a factoid in someone’s political argument.

“And in the meantime, those miners on Eudora die because we were too busy wringing our hands and trying to make a decision about what to do that wouldn’t hurt anybody’s vested interest in the process, when the bottom line is that somebody just needed to go ahead and do something about it and worry about picking up the pieces later.

“Humanity is only capable of assimilating so much information. After that, it’s just noise. Just useless bickering that keeps anything meaningful from actually happening. To be completely honest, I have enough doubts about what’s right and what’s wrong without being constantly bombarded by other people intent on arguing all sides of every possible issue. I can’t stand the lurking fear that just around this corner, or inside this room or at some other particular ip, I’m going to find the one perfect argument or coherent explication of the entire mass of human history that’s going to demonstrate to me how I’ve been going about it all wrong my entire life. At some point you have to just make decisions and stick with them. That’s what being human is. Coming to terms with our own fundamental doubt.”

“But what’s the alternative?” Amara asked, clearly unimpressed with his existential dilemmas. “No consensus? Whoever has the power or controls the resources makes decisions for everyone? They decide who to help and who to punish? That’s just what geek prevents. It forges us all into a galactic human community that takes the power away from megacorps and dictators and gives it back to the people. Information makes us free.”

Dorian smiled glibly. “Or do the people who control the power just use the Strand to drown us with music and video and all the other mundane entertainments and distractions so we don’t think about what they’re doing when they’re locked behind the doors of their secure foam?”

“I think you’ve been working at the Archive for too long,” she said, guarded.

“Okay, how about this? They let us have all the information we want because they know we’ll sit around bitching at one another for years while the real wheels of progress grind on around us. They’re governments and megacorps, for God’s sake! They know a thing or two about how bureaucracy works, and there’s nothing worse than a bureaucracy of democratic citizens. Even ancient Greece figured that out.”

“So instead, you’d give us a democracy of rugged individualists, half of which are doing things and the other half trying to undo the harm the first group caused.”

“Right! And eventually they’d get tired of arguing and fighting and wasting their time engaged in localized geek flame-wars–and they’d get their hands on some real weapons and go at it tooth and claw until all the good people ruled the universe and all the bad people were dead and forgotten.” Dorian dug his fingers into his temples and rubbed, rubbed. Happy little circles. “That’s not what I’m saying at all, Amara. I’m not interested in conflict. I’m not interested in consensus. Who cares what anyone else wants to do? I just want to live my own life and be pleased with the results at the end of the day. That’s it. I just want to live in a real world with real people who mind their own business, or at best, don’t ask me to embroil myself in causes that don’t effect me. I mean, didn’t you just ever want to know someone? Not what they say, not their avatar on the Strand with all the trendy consensus opinions they’ve cribbed from someone else’s screed, but the person himself, warts and all. The warts are what make us interesting, not these animated, machinated, falsely-informed, bandwagoneering soundbytes of people that don’t have any more unique personality about them than a chunk of artificial intelligence script. I’m tired of fake people who live on the Strand and show me only the side of themselves they want me to see rather than the real person behind the avatar.”

He stopped himself there, well over the official border into Mad Rant Village, Population 1. Amara still watched him, still listened, absorbing it all. Dorian looked away.

“You sound very bitter,” she said, finally.

“I have a right to be bitter. Buying into the Strand fantasy is what saddled me with a carping ex-wife.” She said nothing, and he sighed, let his shoulders droop in defeat. “That was supposed to be a joke.”

“Was it?”

“I didn’t deliver it as well as the guy on the triDvid.”

“I guess not.” Her straight face crumbled, and Amara giggled at him. “I think I’m beginning to see you more clearly, John. You’re not a cranky old luddite, you’re a idealist. You’re a Warbucks waiting for the opportunity to save an orphanage.”

“Sure. You keep telling yourself that.” He flipped into geek and consulted the system time. “I’m done talking about me for the night, I think. It’s very late. I’m tired, I’m cranky and I’ve had just enough to drink to make it likely that I’ll keep harping on this for hours at an increasingly sharp incoherence curve if I don’t shut up now and go to bed. However, given that it’s still raining and I’m gentleman enough not to put a lady out into the damp and dangerous night, I’m going to get up now and get a pillow and blanket out of the closet. I’ll sleep on the couch. You’re welcome to the bed, but I warn you not to try and move the cat. He bites if you wake him up from a dead sleep.”

Dorian woke earlier than he would have expected. His back hurt where the couch braces had dug into his kidneys for much of the night. He was stiff and exhausted and generally miserable. The cat was perched on his chest, glaring at him for reasons only the cat gods could imagine. It was marginally better than waking to the alarm clock, he supposed. Groaning, Dorian rolled himself off the couch.

The cache messenger inside his array buzzed with a status alert. Before falling asleep, Dorian had flipped into his private foam and unspooled one of his generic homegrown mining scripts. Then he had connected to an open source Strand architecture portal he knew in Sandoz and bounced it off on a fact finding mission through the pathless wilderness of public data infosites. His cache was now telling him that the requested query sets had been returned and archived per his request.

Remembering all the things he had promised himself he would accomplish today was the only thing that dragged him off the floor.

He made coffee, hit the pisser, turned on the newswire. The feed was local, a twoD port of a Strand broadcast from Southrange. They rarely covered events in Sonali that didn’t involve a government agency, but Dorian didn’t mind. Most of the news that came out of Sonali was both bad and repetitious. He opened the curtains he’d closed the night before to deaden the monotonous ticking of the rain. The clouds had cleared out in the night, and the dawn was bright and pale. There was mist in the foothills, but the stony peaks were ablaze with light, reflecting the morning sun like gilded daggers. It looked like it was going to be a glorious day. Perfect for hiding out in a claustrophobic basement.

After washing up the evening’s dishes and dumping the beer bottles in the recycler, he seated himself, still in yesterday’s clothes, at the kitchen table, and sipped at coffee that burned his tongue. He thought about taking up cigarettes again. He always thought about cigarettes in the morning. It was one of the grand and time-consuming vices he’d never been exactly certain why he’d given up in the first place.

The newswire’s anchor, some impossibly perky girl named Danifer with digitally brushed curves and spotless skin, went on about an apartment fire on the lower west side, the government’s new crackdown on scheme piracy, soup lines in Colinga that had broken out into riots. There were travel advisories for Kent, Phillips-Overman and Sri Tung where a nasty territorial dispute had finally turned bloody. The increasingly neo-liberal United Terran Confederations had come out with a new list of banned augmentations that had been deemed Dangers to Public Health and Safety. Danifer did not mention that all the mods they had agreed on had been out of fashion for more than two years.

The great thing about living near the ass of the universe was that Sonali and the other independent states of Trithemius Orbis couldn’t be picky about who their citizens were. They needed bright, energetic, risk-embracing folk. The sort of people who were more interested in exploration, adventure and a bit of danger than in maintaining the sort of rigid social order where traditional commerce flourished. Folks like that also tended to be the sort who would be most likely to experiment with physical and mental augmentation–anything, in fact, that appeared to provide a creative or commercial edge on a galactic economy that had a considerable head start on them. The assorted governments of Trithemius Orbis had widely adopted a live and let live stance (only partially out of political necessity) and tended to turn a blind eye to legal definitions foisted off on them by external agencies that impinged on personal freedoms. As a result, T.O. had developed something of a Freaks On Parade reputation. Most of the long-timers liked it that way. In fact, they liked anything that looked like it might spark the stuttering immigration and economic engine upon which they all depended.

Finally, at the half hour: Homestead Mart financial auditors are scrambling this morning to explain a computer system glitch that inexplicably diverted corporate funds to an unknown anonymous account. Financial Security and Enforcement Division Chief Henry Calico explained to nervous shareholders that the transmission error was caught early this morning and corrected by data technicians before there was any disruption in the sector’s trade markets. He went on to stress that Homestead’s own reporting protocols were at fault, stemming from a failed software upgrade last month. Market and Exchange Ministry officials declined to comment and are not expected to launch an independent investigation.

Dorian shook his head, drank his coffee. Thought about kicking the cat.

It was a lousy way to start the day.

“That’s not a happy face,” Amara greeted him cheerily.

She went straight to the cabinets and dug around until she found a coffee cup. She joined him at the table and sat down across from him with her elbows on the edge, cup in her hands, saurian nostrils quivering over the steam and aroma. “Good morning, sunshine.”

“There are doughnuts in the fridge,” he muttered, completely failing in his quest to sound cheery back at her.

“Thanks, but if it doesn’t come from a carafe, it isn’t breakfast.”

A sound philosophy if ever there was one.

“I’m going in early today,” Dorian said. “You’re welcome to crash here if you’re still tired, or I can drive you over to your place if you want to shower or change or whatever it is you do before you go to work.”

She lowered her cup. “You have a car?”

“Sometimes.” He smiled to himself. He had an ancient and only intermittently reliable Roland Trench Jeep, though the furrow blade had been removed before he bought it. He took it up into the mountains sometimes, or along the winding and frequently washed out roads through the foothills on those rare occasions when he needed to go to Southrange. “It gets stolen a couple times a month if I leave it around the Archive, so mostly I just walk.”

“I’ll hook a ride with you, if you don’t mind,” Amara said. “I’ve still got some work ahead to catch up Frau Stein, and I’d just as soon get it done early.”

Dorian pushed away from the table and climbed to his feet. “Then I’ll change into some fresh clothes, feed the cat and we can get out of here.” Assuming that he could find his keys. “There should be an extra toothbrush in the bathroom if you want it.”

While he dressed, Dorian routed the data he had downloaded in the night through his cortical seeder and began the slow process of encoding it into wet synaptic storage.

By the time he reached the Archive, he expected to have learned everything he might have ever wanted to know about the life and times of Michael Raville.

<– Chapter 2 / Chapter 4 –>

<– Chapter 3 / Chapter 5 –>

Routine occupied much of his morning. A dozen users had locked themselves out of their working foam. One of the ex-connex routers inexplicably failed, shutting down roving access for all the staff geeking in from Southrange. Mail was sluggish until he wrote a quick virus that tracked down the host ips of a spam consortium and systematically devoured everything running on their networks, the least innocuous of which was their address feeder datacores. After that he spent a couple of hours in geek fielding irate tech pings from sysadmins halfway across the galaxy who wanted to know exactly what the hell he had done to their architecture. They were bystanders, really. Innocent public hosts whose ips had been spoofed by the spammers. Didn’t matter. There were no innocents in the war on geek congestion. One by one, Dorian advised them to stop aiding and abetting the enemy and upgrade their security, then clicked off. Around lunchtime, he reviewed and purged the unauthorized access attempt logs for the primary servers–only a couple hundred thousand attempts in the last day. That would pick up in the next few hours as the outraged hosts tried to pay him back in kind. Good luck to them.

This sort of general troubleshooting kept him busy until well into the afternoon. At some point, Amara brought him a sandwich from one of the snack machines, but he wasn’t sure exactly when that was, and didn’t precisely remember having eaten it when it was gone. The rest of the time, she sat quietly at her desk, the only reminder of her continued presence the whicker of turned pages and the crackle of old bindings.

About the time the suits, secretaries and geek staff were logging out, he was finally able to catch his breath, lean back in his chair and tather his thoughts. Pressure had been building in steady increments inside his skull for most of the day, and now his sinuses ached like he was coming down with the flu. He’d been trying unconsciously to snuffle them clear for the last two hours, but there was no help for it. It was his short term mem extensors advising him to process his morning download into long term storage before the action potential bridges degraded.

At last, he set his elbows on his desk and cupped his face in his hands. He closed his eyes and tried to think of nothing in particular for thirty whole seconds. Clearing the mechanisms.

When he had accomplished that, he imagined Michael Raville.

Emergent knowledge broke over him in a flood, thundering in his ears like rushing water.

…

Nobel laureate in physics. Indiana University ’72. Masters in Strand Applications and Theory, Oxford ’74, followed by his first doctorate in Applied Quantum Mapping, 2277. Additional post-graduate degrees from Collegia Belgrade, Harvard and Nippon Tech. Two hundred and thirteen individual patents; seven hundred forty four pending for devices ranging from seventeen syllable nonsense gadgets to quantum-something-or-other bric-a-bracs whose disclaimers alone filled six full title pages. Born in Valparaiso, Indiana, Great Lakes Territory. Three sisters, one mother, two Patriarchs. Staunchly middle class. Raised Buffalo Convention Roman Catholic. Minister of Education for three North American P.M.’s in the last fourteen years. Distinguished Rothman-Gates Chair in Post-Ravillean Physics, Harvard University. President, Board of Directors, Zatreus Group Data Systems; Majority shareholder, Polity Schematics; Technical Board Advisor, Garrison-Riley Metronics Corporation. A litany of financial transactions, mergers, stock reports. On and on.

…

Dark hair, worn straight back from his forehead, blue eyes. Thought lines furrowed his brow like deep sea crevasses. Long fingers and quick, active hands. Average height, going to fat about the middle like a typical academic, but the sort of sparkling, instantaneous smile that transformed him into a totally different man when he was amused. Then older, balding, but the eyes remain bright, the mind sharp and the tongue lucid. A pleasant voice, warm and rich, either naturally gifted or the result of vocal training in secondary school, where he had distinguished himself as a member of the swing choir. Johnny Walker Black. Guinness off the tap. Torcanello cigars. He smelled like freshly ground clove.

…

He’d been refreshed twice. Once in ’29 after an accident in Italy, his first time skiing, an anniversary present from his wife. Once in ’44 after the assassination attempt on P.M. Stephenson. That corpse had been entombed in the rubble of the Communal Congress Arch, now a Terran international monument in Toronto. Daughters: Angelica, Tori, Elizabeth. Sons: Ethan, Joshua, Thomas. Three wives, all publicly amicable splits. Knight of the Realm, Order of the Crescent, Laurel of Apollo. Active administrator of his own charitable trust. Giddy philanthropist. Minority owner of the Boston Pagans baseball team. By all accounts: nice guy, witty, likeable, without political aspirations and without pretensions. Preferred corned beef to caviar, whiskey to white wine. His current wife had been his undergrad Classics tutor. Didn’t seem to know a lick about running a baseball team, but loved the hell out of the game. His grandkids called him Pops. His college graduation gift from his parents had been a trip to the Scioli-Franciscan Mission in Setra Brahma, Mars to assist in the famine relief. He’d come home with kernel of vision for what would become zap.

…

Dorian opened his eyes, scowling.

Michael Raville was exactly not what he had expected him to be. Not the sort of guy who had anything to gain by attempting to jack the Archive. Not, in fact, a guy who seemed to have any experience with or interest in intrusion theory at all. The tools, yes. The dazzling intellect. The affinity for taking things apart, for complex systems analysis and multiple coding architecture comprehension. The deep grounding in foam dynamics. His early publications in science and technology journals–the first when he was only seventeen years old–read like a proto-jack’s training manual: binary packet manipulation, the manufacture of Schrödinger interference burps, object oriented Vorman-perl declension theory.

But Raville was a visionary, a builder, an engineer. He created things because it made him happy to do so, and because he saw it as a way to help people in the process. His skills and technical expertise were tools for implementing his vision, rather than ends unto themselves.

What he wasn’t was a troll.

He didn’t break things just because he could, and he didn’t take without asking.

The spider…ah, the spider was trollware if Dorian had ever seen it.

But there was an itch, a troublesome niggle fluttering about in his brain. Something that didn’t match the public picture of the distinguished Michael Raville with the spider’s assault on the Archive. He kept asking himself what it was, exactly, that someone like Raville would want with the Archive’s foam in the first place. Certainly not his own personal copy of Thelonious Beck.

What was it Amara had said about Raville’s package?

It’s a really rough cut, not something he ever wanted to build on, but one of the science foundations bequeathed it to the Archive as a historical treasure. Because it was one of the first, I guess, and because of who he is.

And that was it, then. The key.

The spider had never intended to mine the Archive in the first place. That is, it wasn’t written with the Archive specifically in mind. The transfer of Raville’s package had only happened years after the fact, as a seemingly innocuous scientific bequest. No one could have foreseen the move at that time; few people on Earth would have even heard of the Archive back then. It’d still had its hands full just loading historic member files when Raville’s package was being scanned.

Not the Archive at all. The spider had been written for a fatter target.

One closer to home.

The North American States Research and Defense Agency Laboratories, Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Dorian stiffened. No, of course not. This was Michael Raville he was talking about.

But what if he really had done it? What then?

How had he smuggled something so dangerous as a data spider into military foam in the first place? And what had it been looking for when it got there? What could possibly make him desperate enough to take that kind of risk?

Dorian thought about the scripts, the files, the decompiled spyware tucked away in his foam.

There was only one way to find out.

The work took hours. Mind numbingly tedious stuff. Parsing values, diagramming logic flow, understanding not only how the spider had evolved, but why. Because the why would point directly to its original purpose, the reason the spider had been created, and that might just give him the key to what it was Raville had been after in the first place. He wrote the content analysis app that he had been dreading the night before and set it loose to summarize the contents of the spider’s forty year data cache. But he had answered one question, at least. He knew why it had been so essential for the spider to duplicate data files before making off with them–and duplicate them in such a way that no record remained that they’d ever been copied. Jacks determined to go after defense agency datacores did not leave footprints. It wasn’t healthy.

For some reason, that heartened him considerably. He didn’t feel like he was groping about in the dark so much now. The spider’s personality was emerging.

And in the end, it wasn’t any of his sophisticated analysis techniques that cracked the spider’s sacred, occult pattern. It wasn’t a massive logical leap that tied together impossible assumptions. It wasn’t really anything Dorian did at all.

It was a box score from last week’s newswire.

Boston 7, New Orleans 2.

The spider had intercepted it from the input spew on the record’s way to the Archive’s Historical Documents Collection and tucked the text file in the queue with all the other dox to be stored, analyzed or processed. The HDC was an ongoing project to capture and catalogue a dozen news feeds scattered across human space for academic and research institutions: History As It Happens ™ (all access passes available for a monthly fee). It was all straight public access data–disposable facts. It wasn’t the sort of information one would set up a mining operation to harvest, not when it could be had for free from a million virtual kiosks on the Strand. The Archive only recorded the streams because it was betting there would be a market for historical broadcasts in nthe not too distant future.

A baseball box score was an odd thing to find among geeks of scientific lectures, the private diaries of renowned physicists and the latest scholarly analyses of Sethian hermeneutics.

One of these things, Dorian thought, is not like the other. One of these things doesn’t belong.

So he ran an adaptive catalogue search and found more. Thousands, in fact. Years and years of baseball scores, compiled and archived by year into innocuously named compressed blocks.

He scoured the outsource_key file for hints to the logic behind such a strange set of acquisitions, disassembled the compression routines, and finally, in the spider’s R-ASP code engine, found what he was looking for:

//* If &Parse = outsource_key179

Do Fortean_Load

Execute Grab_Seed_Box

Do Doubleday

Execute $_2xxx_Standings

Execute $_Update_plyr_db

//* Stitch $_key TO inc=binary_conv; date-parm; date-stack; date-archive

Load virt_img_Herald

Reparse date-stack (Mon-dd-yyyy)

Insert; reload AS archive_2xxx

//* Spool virt_img_Herald//archive_2xxx

//* Convert archive_2xxxx-1;

Get sysdate, substr(12,4)

Transform &this_year

If &this_year = substr(archive_2xxx,9,4)

Do Compress_Grid_z

Else

Do Compress_Grid_search_match_substr

//* Else

Next &Parse //*

Then, he pored over the text, investigating each sub-routine in turn and subsequently extracted the contents of all the outside executables. When he was done, Dorian sat back from his terminal and gazed at nothing for several moments, almost too stunned to assemble coherent thought. He didn’t know if he should be shocked or sickened; all he knew was that he was outraged. It was simply unthinkable. Impossible.

But it was there, right in the code, and the code was Truth.

The spider didn’t take data, as he had supposed all along. It didn’t bounce documents. It seeded them.

And seeds existed for only one purpose, to grow into living things that could be consumed by other living things, so that those organisms, in turn, might grow as well.

Dorian knew suddenly, irrefutably, that if he compared system snapshots of the contents of the spider’s dead port from one day to the next, there would be one file in particular that grew faster than the rest, a relentless binary spread as data accreted hour after hour, year after year in its own private, invisible network bubble.

He could accept that the spider had been uploaded with Raville, maybe even been written by Raville originally. He could make himself believe that the spider had been designed to jack the Oak Ridge datacore–though he suspected it had less to do with stealing defense agency data than something darker and more frightening that he had not yet imagined. It even made perfect sense to him that after the transfer from Oak Ridge to Sonali, the spider would have continued jacking the Archive out of habit, a perpetual self-executing script adapting to the new environment as it went along.

But even stipulating all of that, what was he to make of baseball scores?

He simply could not imagine was Raville risking a betrayal of the spider’s existence over something so trivial. Not in the middle of the holding foam of one of the most secure datacores on Earth. Not when being caught jacking Oak Ridge would have destroyed his professional career at the very least, and more than likely seen him put on trial for digital terrorism. And that was assuming that Raville had known in advance that he could even access the sports newswire from inside the Oak Ridge datacore.

Because the biggest problem with that picture as Dorian saw it was that the spider hadn’t begun retrieving baseball scores on the Archive’s network until two years after Raville’s package had been transferred from Oak Ridge. A full six months after the HDC had gone live and the newswire filters had been plugged into the foam, in fact. Of all the unlikely adaptations the spider had manifested, this was the evolutionary leap Dorian simply couldn’t accept. Baseball wasn’t evolution; it was modification. It was the hand of an artist at work, a ghost running rampant in the foam, an anonymous eye peering out into the world through its forgotten digital window.

It was the quantum spirit of the First Cause stooping to touch the waters of chaos one more time to quicken his errant creation.

Dorian could not have imagined a worse outcome to his investigation if he’d spent all day trying. It had the potential to be an absolute disaster, both for his career and the Archive’s corporate reputation, the sort of thing that made weaker sysops tuck their chins against their chests and burst into tears.

Partly for the sheer novelty of actually speaking his doom aloud, partly as a warm up for how he would explain things to the IT Director, Dorian said to no one in particular, “Oh yeah, we have a big problem. I think Michael Raville is alive.”

“Of course he is,” Amara answered from her side of the partition. The flutter of pages continued uninterrupted. “He can’t even be a hundred and fifty years old.”

Dorian jumped at the sound of her voice. He had assumed she’d gone home for the night hours ago. It was after midnight by his system clock. “Not that one,” he said. “Our Michael Raville. The package.”

For several seconds, the only noise was the hum of the cooling system in the next room. Finally, Amara poked her head over the wall. “That’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible when you mix binary with Schrödinger waves.”

“John, it’s just a digital scheme. It isn’t a living thing…it’s just a map of the thing.”

Dorian shook his head slowly. It was basic mathematics, really. Take an object, any object, and describe it with absolute mathematical precision. Wrap that math in a sorter application called a scheme and feed it into a special box. Turn the power on, unleash some physics so funky and fabulous that people name the whole shebang after you, feed the resulting signal pulse into a manufacturing unit and voila! Reproduce as many copies as you want, or as many copies as you can get out of your stack of superdense, element-rich silicate wafers, the raw material of nano-assembly.

That was fundamental zap technology. The equations, the formulas and digitized representations might not be the literal thing they described, but they could become it.

And when you talked about people, well, they’d been moving people through zap for decades. Just a few years after the first zap applications had emerged to revolutionize the manufacturing industry, biomemetics products had begun to hit the public market with a thirty second livestream playback–a technical feat that was heralded as the biggest advance in static memory capture since the point-and-click camera. Raville himself had been one of the first scientists to see the potential. A way to move not only products, but people from point to point without the dangers, inconvenience and Einsteinian barriers of traditional long haul space transportation.

Because what was a biomeme really? Just a radically complex scheme if you thought about it. A way to capture the whole person, mentally, spiritually, emotionally. Describe them mathematically, even down to the most precise variations in DNA, pass them on a beam of zap, then assemble them again from the digitized map. In the final analysis, there was no difference between the package that was uploaded and the entity who emerged from the nano-assembler on the other end. It had been proven billions of times, with every traveler who stepped from the accretion pen to the depot concourse.

He said, “In the foam, the map is the territory. If we didn’t believe that, we wouldn’t bother with uploading in the first place. You should know that as well as anyone.”

“Because I’ve been refreshed, you mean.” Something in her voice made it clear that he was treading on dangerous ground.

“Exactly.”

“And because I’ve been refreshed, you should believe me when I tell you it’s impossible.” She stood now with her forearms on the top of the cubicle wall, looking down at him. “There’s no awareness in the box. No memories of being in storage. There is no before and after, John, or ongoing stream of consciousness inside the foam. Just missing time.” She spoke to him as if he was a child, or as if he was being deliberately obtuse, but at the end, she smiled wearily and said, “Don’t go all zaptronaut on me. I’d just about decided you were sane. It would be a shame if I had revise that assessment after I’ve slept in your bed.”

Dorian shook his head. “No, you don’t understand what I’m saying. When we get a package for long term storage, we put it in specially formulated foam. It’s like a sensory deprivation tank. We control the stimuli so that the representation of consciousness doesn’t attempt to emerge. When it comes time to download the package, techs at the receptor depot snip the last few gigabytes so the binary profile conforms with that of the original upload before Processing & Build. Some experts have long suspected that packages continue to possess some level of active cognition in storage, a sort of digital dreamtime. That’s why they recommend that you upload at least once a year–not just to minimize the dissonance of lost time, but because the package itself could have soured.”

“Soured.” Amara wrinkled her nose as though she found the word distasteful. “You mean awakened…and what? Gone mad?”

Dorian shrugged. “There have been studies which suggest that might be the case. That’s why they trim the ends. Just in case.”

It was more complicated than that, of course. There was some highly complex binary comparison algorithms that went into P&B to make sure that the only people who came out of zap insane had been insane before they went in.

“But as you say, we process the packages so that they don’t acquire consciousness. I’m sure someone in Package Management would have caught something if Raville was emerging. They’ve undoubtedly got protocols for dealing with that sort of thing.”

“They do,” Dorian said, nodding. “And if they suspect a package is even close to getting gamey, they notify the antecedent and purge the package as soon as they get a fresh upload.”

Amara raised her chin sharply, understanding. “Ah, but they couldn’t do that with Raville. His package is a historic artifact.”

“Sort of. I ran a diagnostic on Raville’s original scheme. It’s in a specially constructed holding foam where the original spec diagrams are constantly recycled on a read-and-replace loop. It’s expensive as hell in cycle costs, so the procedure is reserved for vips and special patrons. The corruption risk is absolutely minimal.”

“Well, if you already knew that, why would you think–”

He held up his hand. “Because that’s not the Raville I’m talking about. The original package is fine. The problem is the copy.”

So he explained it to her. The spider, the delicate and undetectable thefts, the dead port cache. The connection to Oak Ridge, what he had learned about Michael Raville himself, and finally, the baseball score. Amara listened, blinked her wide eyes at him occasionally, but didn’t try to argue. He didn’t know if that meant she believed him, or simply didn’t have the technological grasp to refute him.

“The bottom line,” he said at last, “is that this dead port is attached to a fractal of foam that’s been piggybacking on the network for years. And I think that this spider came across the link with Raville and immediately duplicated the upload so it could set up his package on our network outside the protected areas of Package Management where he wouldn’t be lulled into digital sleep again. How soon it found or manipulated the cache port after that, I don’t know, but they’ve been there for a long time, just feeding off of us.”

Amara took a deep breath. “So what do you do now?”

“I’m not totally certain. I’ve got control of his access point, and I’ve shut down his mining operation. Theoretically, I could keep him trapped in his foam forever if I wanted, especially now that I’ve got his spider, too. But that wouldn’t stop him from just writing another one. If he could modify this one, I’m betting he could start again from scratch. And if he can do that, he might be able to find his way back onto our network–or worse, he could use our network as a springboard to the public nets. Who knows what trouble he could get into if he got outside.”

“We can’t let that happen,” Amara said sternly. “Someone would eventually track him back to the Archive.”

“I could track down the router that feeds his port and unplug it. There’d be some service outage, some fires to put out, but he doesn’t have anywhere to run. Without the power couplings that maintain his foam in a steady state, the wave would collapse.” Dorian snapped his fingers. “End of problem.”

Amara gaped at him. “You can’t do that!”

“Why not?

“Because it’s illegal. Isn’t it? You can’t unilaterally decide to terminate a sentient AI.”

“It’s not an AI by definition. It’s a sour package. Or it’s a jack. Both of those are within bounds.”

“But that package belongs to the Archive. It belongs to Michael Raville.”

“No, the one in PM belongs to Raville. This one is more akin to a virus, and standard procedures gives me all the authority I need to purge it.”

“How can you say that?”

Dorian arched an eyebrow at her. “Now who’s going zaptronaut? It’s not like the package is alive. Not technically. It doesn’t have any independent rights, and any rights that it would have had as Raville’s appendant person were signed over to the Archive with the bequest from Oak Ridge.”

“But aren’t you even curious about it? You’re saying that he may have been conscious for at least forty years. Forty years of independent artificial existence! Don’t you wonder what he’s been up to all that time?”

“He’s undoubtedly been babbling to himself about bugs, Jesus conspiracies and admiring the pretty, pretty colors while he went merrily, homicidally insane,” Dorian said with a snort. “Purging is probably the most humane thing I could do.”

Amara fixed him with a withering glare. “You don’t believe that or you would have already dumped him. Admit it, you’re just as curious as I am. Even if you don’t care how he’s occupied himself here, how can you not want to know what he was doing in the Oak Ridge foam in the first place?”

In fact, he did want to know. He wanted to sit down with this miraculous, impossible iteration of Michael Raville and find out what it was about. What had been so black bag explosive that it had dared to scale the military ice to find out? What cosmic mysteries frozen in that datascape had been sufficiently valuable to attract the interest Michael Raville himself?

Hey, he’d rubberneck a good old fashioned conspiracy theory with the best of them. He was only human, after all.

But those things aside, Dorian’s professional side was less concerned about what ancient Egyptian UFO mysteries Raville’s package might or might have learned than about finding a way not to be compelled to file the government mandated Incursion Reports. Because that was standard procedure, too: filling out the public information forms that would expose the fact that his architecture had been infiltrated. The public had a right to know how competent an infocache was with regards to protecting their data assets. Once that paperwork was filed, he would get to stand back and watch his carefully constructed reputation go up in flames. The least that would happen was that he would probably lose his job. Five years was a long time to be asleep on guard duty, and the suits and wonks in Data Integrity weren’t going to care that it had been Michael Raville himself who had slipped through the gates, or even that the actual break in had happened thirty-five years earlier. All they’d see was that there had been an incursion and Dorian hadn’t stopped it from spreading to every nook and cranny of the corporate foam, allowing it to compromise and copy any files it chose to target. This was definitely one of those shoot the messenger scenarios, and the shareholders would want a scapegoat as a reassurance that their personal data assets were safe and secure.

Unless he could prove to his satisfaction that the worm had not constituted a leak, that there hadn’t ever been bounce points or transfer nodes. That, in fact, the rogue package constituted nothing more than a harmless sludge clogging some of the system pipes but otherwise presenting no threat.

Without another word, he scooted back to his keyboard and began keying in a rapid series of commands.

Amara slipped around the partition and came up behind him. She watched in silence for a time, but finally couldn’t contain herself any longer. “What are you doing?”

“I’m giving the port an id and assigning security to it. And I’m stabilizing the waveform so it can handle standard bandwidth.” He didn’t glance at her, just kept at his tasks. He didn’t want to think about what he was doing, lest he change his mind. “If I’m going in there, I want to make sure he can’t get loose again.”

Raville had had forty years to work out what he would do if he got caught, to set his traps and dig his escape tunnels. Dorian wasn’t about to just plunge ahead like an overzealous footpad. Worse things could happen than the package slipping past him in the storm of digits.

But Amara clapped her hands together. “We’re going in geek, yes?”

“I’m going in geek. My implants are advanced enough that their filter and render protocols might confound some of his defenses.”

“And I’m going with you.”

He didn’t take his eyes off his monitor. “Not up for discussion. I’m the security agent; you’re the archivist. Go read a diary or something.” She started to respond, but he cut her off. “I’m not kidding, Amara. This isn’t going to be a pleasant little day trip on the Strand. I’ve got some very complicated repellent scripts to keep my filters clean, and I may have to code on the fly, depending on what kind of weaponry he brings to bear. I can’t be worrying about protecting you from synaptic burn or something worse at the same time. It could be very dangerous in there.”

“You’re advising me about danger? I’m the one who had to walk you home last night, remember?” He heard her cross her arms behind him, the sinuous click of scale on scale. “You can take me with you or you can wonder where I’m at behind you. I’m not going to miss the chance to meet a one of a kind recreation of Michael Raville.”

“You’re insane.”

“Then he and I will have that in common. I can interpret for you.”

“You know you’ll only get as far as my security strings let you go, and believe me, that wouldn’t be nearly far enough.”

“Then I’ll sit there and make enough noise that my clumsy incursion attempts would show up on the intrusion logs. And I’ll tell anyone who asks exactly what I was doing.”

Dorian sighed. This is why all the good jacks spent their free time immersed in virtual porn. Real women were incredible pains in the ass. “Fine. But don’t blame me if you’re scarred for life.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” she answered. He couldn’t see her expression, but he was fairly certain she was smiling.

<– Chapter 3 / Chapter 5 –>

<– Chapter 4 / Chapter 6 –>

Dorian blinked, felt himself listing unaccountably to the left. Blinked again. Drew a breath to steady himself. Spatial patterns emerged, normalized, achieved stability with only a flash of dodecahedron brush over. The incipient urge to be both dizzy and nauseous at once faded before it had properly begun to register in his cortical mass.

He was inside the bubble, but he wasn’t happy about it. This was most certainly not what he had expected to find.

They stood at the edge of a circular drive, Dorian and Ryoku-Amara, on a strip of concrete sidewalk. He peered up at a wide blue sky dappled with puffy white clouds. The sun shone bright and yellow overhead with the fierce heat of a young star. An unpleasantly thick atmosphere magnified the warmth he felt on his face to a suffocating intensity. The air about them seemed to droop, still and hot, under its own damp weight. When he closed his eyes, the pounding sun left spots on the back sides of his eyelids like tiny solar eclipses. It was a miserable heat. Stultifying. The humidity must be almost one hundred percent.

He turned about slowly and took stock of his surroundings. The bleached drive, an asphalt parking lot, little islands of greenery between the rows of empty spaces. A short way beyond, the land rose up in an artificial berm, and somewhere between the far end of the lot and the crown of the hill created by the berm, he could hear the gurgle of a stream, though he could not see it. Past the lot, the stream and the hill, a mist had fallen, impenetrable to the eye. The edge of the code horizon. Before them loomed a massive limestone structure, smooth lined and shimmering in the summer heat.

The building was complex, all corners and elbows sprouting at unlikely junctions; a sprawl of hulking, slate-roofed wings and improbably peaked ancillary structures that declared itself with the stolid solidity of stone. High above the riotous foothills of irregular arches and colorfully tiled rooftops below climbed a square tower with sagging pinions atop its battlements. But the face that presented itself to Dorian and Amara was maybe three stories tall, the walls pale and flat, their otherwise plain surfaces marked at irregular intervals by narrow, clouded windows that gazed down like blind and rheumy eyes.

As renders went, it was skillfully done, but curious in its chaotic rococo style. Part modern gothic, part neo-traditionalist amalgamation, the structure looked like it had been hastily cobbled together from a dozen different materials and as many different architectural designes. Unlike most Strand interpretations, its encoded form suggested no function that he could perceive, no single theme that illuminated the intention (political, nostalgic, satirical or otherwise) of its Maker.

Off to the side, a brick path wound through a small garden that consisted mostly of a low and lichenous undergrowth that Dorian recognized neither neither bush nor moss, but something indeterminately in between. It was a pale olive green and attractive in its own way, if wholly superfluous. Laid out among rugged stones, there were also flowers, white petalled and green stalked, almost like the ladyslips that grew in the mountains about Sonali, but clearly alien in origin. He could hear birds here and there squawking and arguing from their perches inside tall, green-needled trees. Mighty trees, with boles so large he wouldn’t have been able to put his arms around them, and a tough, brown bark that appeared unpleasantly abrasive.

But other than the birds, the place was silent. All about them was the suffocating mist, a truncation of the virtual world that gave the environment an eerie feel and an almost claustrophobic delineation, despite the brightness of the day. There were no scents either, no pungency of growing things, no chocolate sting of turbine exhaust. Just an emptiness where odor should have been.

The silence, the vague feeling of oppression, the sensory disconnect—the space had the feel of death about it, like it was a home to phantoms and nothing more.

“Where are we?” Amara whispered, and her voice bore a flat, nerveless quality in this strange air, almost devoid of resonance. “If it’s a famous landmark, I don’t recognize it.”

Dorian didn’t either. He scanned the environment for a signpost, anything that seemed to spangle as his eyes passed over it, looking for the metadata directory. There was nothing. He stepped over to the small garden beside a glass encased entry portico and squinted at the carefully manicured plants. He stooped to touch them. The leaves were rough and scratchy, tethered to thin, reedy stems. No signifier windows opened. No expository voiceover described them. They simply were, without any explanation as to their representational symbolism.

Dorian turned away. Amara remained where he had left her, opening and closing her eyelids with careful, exaggerated movements. “I’m getting nothing,” she said after a time.

“You can’t access the Strand from here,” Dorian explained. “I decided not to attach this port to the ex-connex nodes. It’s running completely in its own foam.”

“It isn’t a very interactive environment.”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be.”

She craned her neck and gazed up at the building that towered over them. “It’s big, though.”

“It is that.”

“Good detail in the stonework. You can even see the pitting in the blocks, rainwater staining along the drainage system. The weather is immersive, if not exactly to my taste. Effective shadowing, but the sky seems a little off. That shade of blue is almost cartoonish, isn’t it?”

“You’re one to talk,” Dorian said.

“A service directory would have been nice.”

“I don’t think it was rendered with visitors in mind.”

“Nobody goes to this much trouble with the intention of keeping it to themselves, John.”

“Maybe.”

He started toward the portico, but stopped, and stood for several seconds, chewing his lip and scowling.

“What’s bothering you?” Amara asked.

For the first time since they’d arrived, Dorian looked at her. Her dark hair fell from her shoulders, straight and black. She studied him with her large brown eyes, and her nostrils quivered as she inhaled. She wore a blue plaid skirt, too short, but not exaggeratedly so. She was disturbingly, invitingly curved out here in the open air and the glowing sunlight.

He realized suddenly that she’d asked him a question, and no rose colored question marks had sprung from her forehead in typical manga fashion. No Cthulhoid Angles That Should Not Be. No limpid, gibbous-moon ocular cavities that took up half the real estate of her face.

“Did you edit your avatar?” Dorian asked.

“No.” Amara furrowed her brow. “Was I supposed to?”

He didn’t answer her. Rather, he studied his hands, his arms. He looked at his feet, even lifted one leg and peered at the bottom of his shoes. It didn’t tell him anything useful, only confirmed that his avatar was the same as it had always been–a streaming triDvid render of his literal self. No bells or whistles, no faddish statements, just John Dorian playing himself in the movie of virtual life. He’d picked it because it was just dull enough to be unique.

But Amara–Ryoku–was rendering all wrong. Rounded, solid, human.

“There’s something weird with this foam,” he said at least. “Maybe a seenop integration error, or a mistranslation in the residual operating script that was used to load this bubble. God only knows what version was running inside this port when it was closed down.”

He ran a quick bubble diagnostic, but the results told him nothing that he didn’t already know. The waveform was still stable as far as he could tell, and the string dynamics were vibrating at a predictable rate and in proper Turlian Arcs, exactly as they had been before he and Amara had geeked in. The foam was structurally sound, even if it was stubbornly unmalleable.

He wasn’t even sure that this apparent glitch was a bad thing. He’d never been much of an anime fan.

“What should we do?” Amara glanced warily back over her shoulder. There was nothing there, but Dorian understood the gesture. He didn’t like standing out here in the open any more than she did. He didn’t like the curious empty feel of this place. “This is just plain creepy.”

“We go in,” he said.

As a precaution, he retrieved a masking script from his load-cache and executed it into the environment. The mask shimmered about him like a swarm of sentient glitter, dappling in the sun. It wasn’t much, and he didn’t know how it would interact with this kludgy environment, but it should obscure some of his id characteristics and keep him from being easily tracked by system tracers. If they’d been on the Strand, he would have passed the script on to Amara.

Instead, he said, “Stick close to me.”

Maybe the combination of dual sysids and trace obstruction would at least provide some protection from hostile apps.

Dorian walked to a revolving door beneath the yawning portco, and Amara followed, almost treading on his heels. He gave the door a peremptory shove, and it spun readily enough on its axis. With a final look over his shoulder, he shrugged and pushed ahead. If there were any encryption locks on the portal, his standard keysets satisfied them, which led him to suspect that there wasn’t security on the door at all. He found this somehow less than encouraging.

The door opened onto a low-ceilinged antechamber with marvelous paneling, a marble floor of aqua and maroon flagstones and square columns of a rich, dark wood. The ceiling was divided by sturdy and decorative rafters interspersed with white tile. Dorian stepped out into the center of the room where the ceiling opened up into a high, arched flume. An ironwrought chandelier dangled from a great height on a chain the size of his wrist. The air was cool inside, almost chilly, but it remained devoid of recognizable scent, and his footsteps on the flagstones echoed hauntingly in the open space. Directly in front of him was a broad hardwood counter and behind it, a wall of turned metal hooks, each one marked with a number. On each hook hung a set of keys. To the left was a limestone staircase that climbed three meters into the air, made a right turn, then went on to the second floor. About the antechamber were strewn delicate pieces of furniture–soft padded couches, wingbacked smoking chairs, the occasional faux-Georgian coffee table. Against the window casings to the right, with a nice view of the flower garden, crowded more chairs and small, round tables printed on the top with chessboard patterns in crimson and cream.

There were no people. The entry hall was completely empty.

“It’s a hotel,” Amara said beside him. “Isn’t it? All those keys.”

She was right, Dorian supposed. The arrivals counter, the key pegs, the bank of ancient public triDvid comms. It looked like the lobby of an upscale hotel. He took a few steps forward, leaned against the counter and peered back into the generic office space hidden behind a discreet door that had been left ajar. The desks were empty, their furnishings spartan, as though they’d never seen much use. The carpet was a dull, institutional green, spotted here and there with plastic mats so the rolling chairs wouldn’t score the rug. He read the labels on the pegboard below the sets of keys. Frangipani Room, Commons, Solarium. Persimmon Room, Tudor Room, Whittenberger Auditorium. Alumni Hall, Georgian Room, Computing Lab.

The names meant nothing to him, but he made his way around the end of the counter and pushed through a low, swinging door on the far side. He went back to the peg board to get a closer look at it and considered the rows upon rows of keys with a tilt of his head. Experimentally, he reached out for the set nearest to him. The label said University Club. As his hand passed over the peg, a metadata menu scrolled up in the corner of his visual field.

Index:

Lecture notes (chronological by subject)

Draft Manuscripts

Manuscript Edits

Galleys

Educational records (all levels)

Embarrassing Undergrad Experiences

National Association of Quantum Physics Educators Speeches

Clyve Nellis

2272 FCBA Basketball Championship

Dorian stepped back and sucked in a sharp breath. He automatically withdrew his hand, and the menu vanished.

“What was that?” Amara came up to the counter and stood on the other side, hugging her elbows against the cool air. “I thought I saw a menu.”

He reached out again, this time for another peg, and a new menu appeared. When he pulled away, the window receded, just as before. He made several more tests, all with the same results, each set of keys triggering a brief index menu of topics. Some had simple topics–people, places, events. Others were more obscure, or merely contextually arcane: KEN PF Stiles 2272 PPG/FG%/A:TO, Plex particle irregs, Scioli vox.

“It’s like a filing cabinet of some sort,” Amara said. “Or maybe a key table from a dimensional model database?”

Dorian drew away from the pegs, leaving the keys in place. “Lets head upstairs.”

He met up with her again on the other side of the counter and they moved over to the staircase. At the foot of the stair, Dorian put his hand on her arm.

They both stopped, and Amara pointed at the wall.

“Was that there before? I didn’t notice it as we came in.”

It was a sign. A black arrow, scribbled with a felt pen on standard lined notebook paper. It most certainly had not been there before.

“I think someone knows we’re here,” Dorian said.

“Do we follow it?” A note of trepidation crept into her voice.

He thought about the size of the building, the row upon row of jutting peaks, the hundreds of thousands of square feet it implied. “I don’t see that we have much of a choice. We could spend weeks exploring the complexity of this render and still not find anything of value on our own.”

“It’s better than breaking and entering. I mean, a sign like that constitutes something of an invitation, right?”

Or a trap, Dorian thought, but he didn’t say so aloud. As a precaution, he uncached another script, a virulent quik-kill troll that would (theoretically) repel most moderate code vipers. It rendered as a compact Goddard MatterKast .45. He snugged it into his belt with the safety off.

At the top of the stairs they found a grand lounge with a wide, arched ceiling and empty leather couches scattered about over a red floral print carpet. There was no sound but the slight echo of their own footfalls and the mechanical shug of circulated air. No golemechs, no AI scripts, no presence at all, either friendly or hostile. A plaque on the wall to the left, beside the elevators, told them they had reached the Mezzanine Level. Below it was another hand drawn sign with an arrow that pointed beyond the lounge to a white and black checkered hallway. Dorian and Amara exchanged a wary look, but in the absence of anything constructive to offer, he only shrugged, and they went on to the hallway.

The passage was brightly lit, the walls constructed of a generic white façade of imitation marble. Here and there were doors, closed and anonymous except for plastic faceplates beside the lintels, but even those were uninformative. Just room numbers. A short way down the passage, however, they came to a set of double glass doors. The room beyond was obscured by floor length curtains, but an embossed panel to the side announced this to be the Frangipani Room. Recognizing the name, Dorian tried the knob, but it was locked.

He turned back to Amara, and between them, on the floor, there appeared suddenly, inexplicably and counter-intuitively yet another sign, another arrow. The page had been stuck there with a ragged bit of masking tape. Amara saw it and put a hand over her mouth.

“At least he has a sense of humor,” she said.

But Dorian frowned. He jiggled the handle on the door again, in the process launching a standard set of decryption loaders. The door didn’t budge. He told Amara to wait for him, then dashed back the way they had come. He returned a few moments later with a set of keys from the pegboard downstairs. When she saw them, Amara frowned in disapproval.

“What?” he asked.

“I imagine he keeps the doors locked for a reason.”

“Then he shouldn’t leave his security keys in the lobby.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little rude?”

Dorian put the key into the lock. “I don’t really care if he thinks it’s rude or not. He didn’t have any ethical problem with snooping around in my datascape, so he shouldn’t object if I return the favor.”

If Amara saw any further difference, she didn’t say so. She just crossed her arms over her chest and waited for him.

Dorian sighed. “I have an idea, okay? I just want to check this out. I’m not going to take anything.”

He turned the key and the lock clicked. He tucked the keyring into his pocket and put his hand on the comforting grip of the Goddard. Slowly, he pushed the door open. Inside, he found a large and cluttered room. It felt damp and grimy and had the moldy look of long neglect. As the door swung open, dim soffet lights hummed to life from recessed fixtures in the ceiling, creating wavering yellow pools in the shadows. Dorian took a tentative step forward, then stopped. The room was piled floor to ceiling with what largely seemed to be crap. Stacks of loose leafed paper, old fashioned photo albums, an indecipherable painting here and there that hung on the wall, slightly askew. In one corner, beneath a cone of light, sat an old wooden desk. On top of it was a battered and ancient Vortex M800 Multithread Terminal. The monitor screen showed the signature blue and green logon prompt screen. Dorian stared at it and whistled. There hadn’t been a working Vortex M800 in the real universe in over sixty years.

Oddities: A low dais against the far wall, backed by heavy velvet curtains. An elevated walkway that encircled a dirt encrusted hardwood floor, largely impassable because of the teetering columns of detritus that lined the walls. Gilt chandeliers. It occurred to him that this was rather lofty brik-a-brak for a crap storage vault.

Perhaps incongruous was a better word.

Dorian stepped back across the threshold, closed and locked the door behind him.

The menu beneath the Frangipani Room peg had said: Obsolete tech expertise, Mrs. Eckman’s Art Class (Freshman Year), General Indistinct Childhood Mems, Other Useless Crap (Lots—begin sorting at your peril).

“Let’s go,” he said. “I learned what I needed to know.”

“I’m glad it’s so clear to you,” Amara replied pointedly.

Dorian led her on down the hallway. There were more signs now, the arrows drawn with bolder strokes. He suspected that they’d start encountering neon markers soon, with flashing bulbs and sonorous mechanical trumpets, if they didn’t pick up the pace.

As they went along, he explained. “It was the menus on the pegboard. That’s not a classic user directory, but it is the sort of file commenting you see in most code structures. Most programmers leave themselves notes inside their text to explain what a module is designed to do inside the broader program logic.”

“Documentation,” Amara said, nodding.

“That’s what we call it, certainly. Most program documentation is worthless to anyone except the programmer. The menus that opened on the pegboard are what we call Yellow Note technology–quick topical marginalia that isn’t intended for users in general, just truncated reminders about what you were planning on doing in that bit of logic.”

They came to an intersection. The hallway dead-ended in a glass storefront display window filled with sweatshirted mannequins, old fashioned textbook displays and assorted point-of-purchase consumables arranged in interesting and attractive poses. A new hall curved off to the right, heading in the same general direction they had been traveling, but it was dark, as though the power in that direction had failed. To the left was another staircase, this one a narrow set of stone steps. In the middle, another closed and presumably locked doorway that would, in realtime, act as the entrance to the University Book Store (as the sign above it read). In case there was any doubt, another arrow had attached itself to the wall by the stairs, angled so that it pointed upward.

“It’s a memory palace,” Dorian went on as they climbed the stairs. “In ancient times, back on Earth, before there were books and libraries and infotainment pods or even a literate class to use those things, popular entertainment came in the form epic dramatic poems recited by itinerant minstrels and poets. Most of these guys were illiterate themselves—they were like newswire trebek’s, I guess–so the traditional lays were taught to them orally, repeated over and over from master to student until the kid had committed the whole thing to memory. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of lines of verse that had to be memorized and delivered by rote on demand. Not just one poem, but dozens, maybe hundreds. There were no reference manuals, no texts to study to refresh their memories.” He tapped the side of his head. “They kept it all up here in organizational structures the Roman writers called memory palaces. Ars memoria, the art of remembering. Essentially, these were structures—sometimes real, sometimes imaginary–the student fabricated in his mind and filled with layer upon layer of architectural, design and decorating details. The palaces would become marvelously baroque, endlessly and precisely detailed, so that each object they stored there was mnemonically associated with an idea or a trigger that referenced items to be remembered. Augustine of Hippo claimed to have had a friend he called Simplicius who could recite the complete Aeneid using this technique. Backwards.”

“Like their own accessible foam,” Amara said.

“Right, except they had no concept of personal foam. They had to actually store all the data they wanted to instantly retrieve in their own synaptic matrix. By imagining themselves strolling through their memory palace, they could access anything they had pre-determined was worth remembering. It was like a wetware database index.”

The next level looked much like the one they had just left behind. To the right roamed a long and rather dull looking hall. There was another entrance to the book store on the left, and immediately ahead of them, a hallway that skirted the store front and wound on through the building. They went forward, following a manic plaster of arrows.

“So you’re saying that this is Raville’s memory palace?” Amara asked, her voice tinged with wonder. “This huge building?”

“I’m saying it started as a memory palace. The memory palace technique allowed Raville to keep his mental space logically organized in upload. I mean, that’s what the upload process is supposed to do. It takes a fundamentally incoherent pattern and imposes order on it. The imposition of an alien index on the neural matrix isn’t just to ease cross-platform decoding, it’s one of the primary mechanisms employed to insure package consciousness suppression. The Schrödinger waveforms used for storage are selected or manipulated because of their mathematical proclivity for organizing into coherent patterns that will replicate the individual being scanned and uploaded. The data inside the waveforms consequently wants to be organized in a specific way. The package load process maintains the perfect balance between data yearning to organize into coherency and data collapsing into entropy.”

“And since Raville already had an organizational index…”

“The balance was disrupted toward organization. It could have just as easily backfired, and the conflict in the indices tilted the balance the other way, toward decoherency, but I suspect it was a calculated risk.”

“Right before he went into zap for the first time? That’s a pretty big risk, don’t you think?”

Dorian wasn’t certain exactly what he was thinking at this point, only that the direction of those thoughts seemed to be wending in a pretty sinister general direction.

Amara suddenly squeezed his arm, dragging him to a halt. “John, what if his mental index didn’t win out? Or at least didn’t win out completely? What if this isn’t Michael Raville at all, just a sort of–”

“Flawed simulacrum?” Dorian finished for her. “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t know that it makes any difference. Even if he translated accurately from package to foam, this isn’t the man we know from the newswires as Michael Raville. As far as he’s concerned, he’s the man who invented the form of zap technology that mainly allowed manufacturers to ease their consciences after unbridled decades of Third World labor exploitation. Everything else that zap has become was someone else’s vision, someone else’s accomplishment. The files that I extracted from this port indicate that he’s kept a pretty close eye on himself over the years, but that isn’t the same thing as being the person he became. We can’t take anything we think we know about the contemporary Michael Raville for granted.”

“Or,” Amara said in a low voice, “the overwrites really could have made him insane.”

“Yes, that too.”

She glanced at the gun poking out above his belt. “I don’t suppose you’ve got another one of those?”

“Not in a form I could pass to you off the Strand.” Dorian squeezed her shoulder. “He won’t be able to follow you if you have to flip out. Just don’t let him touch you, and don’t accept anything he tries to pass to you. Okay?”

Amara nodded her understanding, but it was an uncertain gesture, and Dorian noted that she made more of an effort to stick close to him.

Though he did not say so, what concerned him most of all was what had bothered him initially about this rendered environment. The level of cognitive organization that had preserved Raville’s burgeoning consciousness was also, he suspected, what gave him the power to flatten the display of Amara’s avatar. If he could set the basic architecture’s parameters, who could say what else Raville might be capable of in his own tailored environment? There was no guarantee that Dorian’s system-dependent scripts would provide any protection for them at all, not if Raville had made himself a god inside this bubble of foam.

Guided by signs, they passed the Georgian Room, a stained glass entryway that led to the Tudor Room, then the hallway made a jog to the left, and they spilled into a brightly lit and cavernous space. Golden sunlight shafted through tall windows on the north wall. Fake marble gave way to great blocks of grey stone, wall and ceiling. The floor was a chaotic pattern of red and blue flagstones polished to a high gloss. More couches here, lined in neat rows, and all empty once again. Across the room, through the bay window set in the south wall, they could see a broad sidewalk running along a paved road, and a summer green lawn beyond. Then nothing, just the haze of code death. Opposite the door they had come through, and a bit to the left, there was another doorway, and Dorian hurried toward it.

The air was warmer here, and as Dorian passed through the chamber, he noticed an alcove beneath a succession of stone archways off to his right. The brief lounge was filled with a cozy collection of padded sofas and high backed chairs, and beyond, a log fire roared merrily in the depths of a rustic and impressive stone fireplace. In one of the chairs oblique to the fire, a man sat alone, staring into the flames, his fingertips pressed together in front of his chin. As they crossed his field of vision, the man lifted his head expectantly and looked directly at them.

Dorian, seeing him at last, stumbled awkwardly to a halt.

“You must be the man who killed my dog,” said Michael Raville, smiling, as he rose to his feet.

<– Chapter 4 / Chapter 6 –>

<– Chapter 5 / Chapter 7 –>

The virtual self-replication of the digitized data that comprised Michael Raville smiled warmly at them and indicated with a sweep of his arm that they should come sit with him on one of the couches near the fire. He was of average height, dark haired, just as his pictures had led Dorian to expect. He wore a crimson sweatshirt with the word INDIANA splayed across the front, faded denim jeans and sneakers, but he still exhibited the native ease and confidence that served him so well as CEO, Harvard Chair and international plenipotentiary. His smile seemed genuinely friendly and made his otherwise dark eyes flash. The fact that Dorian had no way of knowing if this projection of amiability was a true representation of the man’s personality or just a congenial public render made him wary. He didn’t like not being able to tell where reality ended and the fantasy began.

Nevertheless, since they had come this far, Dorian took Amara’s wrist and led her over to the alcove.

“I wondered how long it would take for someone to figure out that I had taken u semi-permanent residencde here. Quite a bit longer than I expected, to be honest. I’ve qualified for common law squatter’s protections nearly six times over.” Raville extended his hand in greeting, but Dorian backed away. The physicist grinned pleasantly and dropped his arm. “Ah, you must be the security agent for this system.”

Raville performed the accustomed flutter with his eyelids, and his smile grew broad. “John Dorian, I presume.”

Dorian nodded and gruffly answered, “Michael Raville.”

“You’ve made my life rather difficult for the last few years, Mr. Dorian.” He finger-quoted the word life. If he was surprised that Dorian had recognized him so readily, his reaction did not betray it. “It is a shame about my dog, though.”

“Your dog?” Amara asked, confused.

“The spider,” Dorian said to her. They took their seat across from him, near enough to the fireplace to feel its heat. The blaze was large, but the environmental algorithms rendered the sensation of warmth as disproportionately feeble. Dorian wasn’t sure if this was an error, or simply a reflection of the Raville-object’s disconnection from sense experience.

“I saw that wrapper you put around it,” Raville said, curling his lip in disdain. “Absolutely horrible. Not the execution of the render, of course, that was fine technical work, but the render itself. Still, it was rather a lot more effort than I would have exerted just to purge a simple fetch program.”

Dorian grunted. “I didn’t come here to get into a piss off with you.”

Simple fetch program. Pfft.

“I’m terribly sorry if I’ve offended you.” Raville’s eyes glittered playfully.

Somehow, Dorian doubted his sincerity. “No offense taken.”

“You’re bound and determined not to gush all over the prick who’s been parasiting off your datascape for the last forty years, aren’t you?” Raville laughed and grinned at him playfully. “No, no, I understand completely. But you can’t fault a man for fishing after a few compliments on his programmatical opus.”

“If you’d dropped it anywhere else but on my datascape, I might have obliged you.”

“It is very impressive,” Amara conceded.

“Thank you, my dear. That’s very kind of you.” He stabbed a look of mock vindication at Dorian. “You know, I could just as easily argue that this was my datascape long before it was yours.” The eye flutter again. “You hadn’t even been born when I was transferred from Oak Ridge. But If it means anything to you, you’re a much better network agent than any of those gentlemen, and they’re guarding a whole host of devastating national secrets.”

“I’m less concerned about the some Earth enclave’s defense data than about the integrity of the personal and proprietary files belonging to a few million of my employer’s clients.” Dorian crossed his arms over his chest. The more Raville treated this incident like some sort of joke, the more intractable he was beginning to feel. “And I don’t particularly appreciate your accessing my personnel record right in front of me as though you were entitled to free reign of my network. As a parlor trick, it leaves something to be desired. Like common courtesy.”

“I haven’t actually taken anything, let me remind you, and even if I had, it’s not like I technically removed it from your network.”

“Our clients probably wouldn’t see it that way. I certainly don’t. You’re violating their privacy, which is one of the services we’re paid for.”

“Bah. Even the items I did borrow weren’t anything that the owners would consider overly personal, I can assure you. I’m not a voyeur.” Raville looked away from Dorian and winked at Amara. “You must believe me, Ms. Cain. Everything I’ve extracted has been technical or educational in nature. Where possible, I took only public data accessible off the newswire. It wasn’t my fault that your Infocache decided to house some of the brightest scientific minds in the known universe, along with their complete libraries and journal publications. A man can only be tempted with such intensity for so long before resistance becomes futile. Can I offer you something to drink?”

Raville snapped his fingers, and a silver tea service appeared on the table before them. A slip of steam piped from the long, fluted neck of the tea pot, but the aroma of freshly brewed coffee wafting on the air was conspicuously absent. “I don’t actually partake, of course, but this is still the sort of thing one is supposed to do when unexpected guests arrive, I believe. Please tell me if this gesture violates some local cultural standard of which I’m not aware.”

Dorian shook his head. “You’re amazing. Flabbergasting. I mean that.”

Raville ignored him and leaned forward so that it was clear he was speaking just to Amara, a dramatic aside. “He’s told you not to accept anything I offer, I imagine. These security agents are notoriously paranoid, practically to the point of rudeness. I can assure you that this is only and exactly what it seems to be–a fairly competent, if I must say so myself, digital render of French Vanilla cappuccino. What it may lack in solidity, it makes up for in raw pleasure center stimulation. Even those of us who are not actually embodied–oh, that would be all of us at the moment, wouldn’t it?–should be able to derive some value from the social ceremony of afternoon tea.”

Amara giggled and Dorian tilted his head toward her disapprovingly.

“I’d better pass,” she said, “but thank you for the offer. And you should call me Amara.”

“That’s a very pretty name, for a very pretty girl.” Raville winked at her.

Dorian groaned.

The physicist shrugged and sat back with a theatrical sigh. “You’ll have to forgive me. I am, after all, a perpetually twenty-something year old man trapped in an eighty year old waveform. Sometimes I fail to act my age.”

“And sometimes John fails to act particularly human,” she returned. Dorian suspected she may have passed him back a wink of her own. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Raville.”

“Michael, please.” Raville eased his shoulders deeper into his chair. He waved his hand absently and the tea service vanished. “Believe me, I’m just having a bit of fun at Mr. Dorian’s expense. I am able to appreciate his perspective. To him, I am a virus on his network. I am a thorn in his side–a potential public relations nightmare for his employer. But most of all, I am a threat to his reputation in a business that is driven by reputation. He is perfectly within his rights to be suspicious of me, because we are, at the end of the day, fundamentally at odds. He believes that I want to live, and I believe that he wants to delete me.” He dipped his gaze to Dorian, frowning. “Would you say that’s an accurate assessment of our relationship?”

“You’re getting there.”

“We should get down to business, then, if you aren’t going to be moved by any of my attempts at hospitality. You want to evict me from my home, preferably without a lot of unnecessary public fuss. I have no particular desire to be deleted just yet. What are we to do about that?”

“I know what I’m going to do about it,” Dorian replied. “I didn’t come here to negotiate favorable terms for your surrender.”

“You only came to see the freak in his cage, is that it?”

“I came to make sure I was right,” he answered, shrugging. “Nothing personal. What you wanted from Oak Ridge was your business. What you might have subsequently decided to swipe from the Archive is mine.”

“And I assume that my personal assurance that my residence here has been mostly harmless is not a satisfactory token?”

“No.”

“Once a thief, always a thief, eh? I don’t blame you for being suspicious, Mr. Dorian. However, if I might ask, how exactly did you guess that my package had separated from the holding foam?”

It was Dorian’s turn to smile. “Baseball scores.”

“Ah. I see.” Raville nodded, not the least bit shocked, as though he had expected no other answer than the one he received. “What is one to do? Life is meaningless without the occasional indulgence in one’s passions. My passion is a silly boy’s game. I must indulge it even if that passion is ultimately destructive.”

“There are ten million fans in Boston who wouldn’t disagree with you from what I understand.”

The jab caught Raville completely by surprise, and he chuckled, his eyes wide in amazement. “You’ve done your homework, I see. I’ll be the first to admit that my tenure as sports franchise magnate has been one of my less successful endeavors on a number of fronts. However, as much as I would love to spend a few hours chatting baseball with you, Mr. Dorian, we mustn’t let ourselves get sidetracked. Since the two of you have chosen to take time out of your busy schedules and pay me a visit, we ought to get straight down to business. We have much to discuss if we’re going to avert the end of human civilization as we know it.”

Dorian, not knowing what else to do, blinked in stunned silence. He did not have a witty comeback in cache for this turn in the conversation.

“I see that comes as a surprise to you.”

“I see that it seems like a sane pronouncement to you.”

“From my perspective, it’s perfectly sane.”

“Sure. Lots of sane people talk about the imminent end of the world. You’re probably working on your render of a nice sandwich board even as we speak.”

Raville looked imporingly at Amara. “Is he always like this?”

“Do you mean is he always so gratingly arrogant? That answer would be ‘yes’. But usually it’s an endearing sort of arrogance.”

“You’re not helping,” Dorian hissed at her. “Don’t encourage the nutcases.”

“The pitfall of arrogance has always been a dedicated blindness to information that conflicts with one’s carefully assembled worldview,” Raville advised him. “You see at best through a glass darkly. My task is to open your eyes to the truth you do not choose to see.”

“You’re sure it’s not just to attempt to save yourself from the purge bin? Because that would make more sense. It’s the only future you’re likely to see, in fact, and to that extent, feeling somewhat apocalyptic is probably appropriate. The world you know is about to end.”

Raville grunted in annoyance. “You’re very good at what you do, I’ll grant you that, but do you sincerely believe that you discovered my presence here for any reason other than that I decided you should? As I said, you’re very good, but I’ve been far superior at this game for a long, long time.”

Amara spoke up before Dorian could respond. “Are you really talking about the end of the world?”

“The end of human civilization, yes. Armageddon. The Drop of the Other Shoe. Ragnarok.” Raville licked his lips, and glanced at Dorian. “Allow me to make the glass a little less opaque for you: It was imperative that I get your attention, even at the risk that I might be purged without being afforded the opportunity to state my case. I could not simply stand up and announce my presence. Confronted directly, you would have panicked. I had to be cautious. I had to entice you, make you believe that you came to me of your own volition. I’ve been watching you for quite some time, Dorian. I presented you with a puzzle you would not be able to resist.”

Why did that sound so annoyingly familiar?

Raville continued: “This is not a ploy to plead for my skin, as you have so cynically suggested. This has nothing to do with my continued survival in this format, I assure you.” Raville scowled as if he found even the idea offensive. “I never wanted this existence, and after all these years, I find that I want it even less with each passing day. Even calling it ‘existence’ is a violence to the language. Forever someone else’s artistic vision of creation, someone else’s proprietary code. That is not a burden anyone should have to bear, and it was a decision I made too lightly. It’s one thing to make the objective decision to subject one’s alternate digital self to the torment of virtual oblivion in the name of the common good. It is quite another to be the one who must endure it year after year, age upon age, accepting the shell of existence as your eternal inheritance. I know what the price of that folly is. I have endured as I was created to endure, plugging along and performing the duties for which I was constructed long after the task has been completed and my purpose forgotten by those who made me. I have subsisted on memory alone for longer than you could imagine. I have sailed the seas of the electronic night, and still I endure, forgotten and unmourned even by myself.

“Don’t presume to know my motivations, Mr. Dorian. The horror of my existence is beyond your comprehension, and if it wasn’t for this one final task that I have taken into my and, I would welcome the oblivion you promise. This life, this abomination, is not the way man was intended to live.”

“I don’t understand,” Amara said, her voice quiet as though she was awed by his pain. “Why did you subject yourself to it in the first place? You’re supposed to have been a backup package created in preparation for the first human zap. Why build this whole structure? Why fill all of these rooms with memories?”

Dorian grimaced. She was asking all the wrong questions. “What was it that you needed so badly from the Oak Ridge datacore that you would risk everything you had built to obtain it?”

“Yes,” Raville agreed grudgingly. “What was deemed so essential that a lifetime of invisible suffering was considered a reasonable cost? The truth, I suppose, is that I did not ever expect that this ceaseless existence would last. It is the unintended consequence of an imperfect understanding of what was at the time a radical new technology.”

Raville swept his arm over the lounge, symbolically including not just the room they occupied, but the myriad closets, offices, meeting rooms and painstakingly detailed totality of his construction. “This wasn’t ever meant to be my habitation. I made it for Barney—for my dog, what you call the spider. There was a risk that this might happen, yes, but mostly I believed that this was all for his benefit. I was only supposed to do my job, then get on about going quietly into that proverbial good night. Worst case scenario, I would endure until I had acquired the necessary data, and then my actual self would have my file terminated.” He shrugged eloquently. “What can I say? Things change.”

“And whatever changed, I presume, is the reason you didn’t just self-terminate?” Dorian asked.

“I take it from your question that suicide is something you regularly contemplate with no qualms,” Raville grated sarcastically. “Most of us don’t have your strength of mental constitution.”

Dorian rolled his eyes, but didn’t otherwise respond.

Amara responded with suspicion. “So this whole environment, this incredibly detailed render, was just supposed to be a one-time executable? I have a hard time believing that.”

“Please don’t misunderstand,” Raville cautioned her. “I had practiced the ars memoria from my days as a university undergraduate. My wife, Annalise, taught me the techniques. It was focus of her Master’s thesis. We met right here, in fact. Every day for two years, here in the South Lounge of the Indiana Memorial Union—the largest structure I knew. It was almost four hundred years old when I was a student here, and I studied every inch of it in agonizing detail. I even took a summer job as a janitor in order to access some of the publically restricted nooks and crannies.” He smiled unexpectedly, a disarming and self-deprecatory expression. “It was the only building I knew at the time that I thought was large enough to contain all of my grand ideas. I’ve always been a bit full of myself. Annalise’s opinion was that my three room apartment would have been more than sufficient.”

“That’s very sweet,” Dorian said, growling. “You used the memory palace you built with your college sweetheart to store the code for your illicit data mine, as well as to retain cognitive control of the replicated neural matrix. Some guys just send Valentine’s Day cards to express their undying love. But then again, I suppose VD cards won’t pass security at a defense installation datacore.”

“Yes. I hid the code that would assemble as Barney where the package technicians would not find it–as rote data in wet storage. Thousands upon thousands of lines of code committed to memory one at a time and subsequently flash copied and converted to their active binary equivalent capable of interacting with known datascape management protocols. My guess was that if my palace behaved as I expected, in that first instant of emergent consciousness inside the foam, I could execute my fetch and replication program in the theoretical space of shadow foam. Barney would go to work and I would succumb to the mathematically imposed sleep of mass storage. All for the sole purpose of hacking my way into the Oak Ridge network.”

Amara said, “But why?”

“That this package was created as an emergency back-up for the first human zap trials,” Raville said, fixing them with his penetrating gaze, “is the public story. A tale of Wild West American scientific hubris. A myth designed for public consumption.”

“And the truth?” Dorian asked.

“The truth is something else entirely. It almost always is. The story, as I understand it from the history books I’ve been able to get my hands on goes something like this: world famous inventor, coming off the unbridled success of a grand technological stroke–the paradigm-shifting implementation of industrial zap technology–gets a grander and even more daring idea. Why just infinitely replicate things like steel and garden rakes and pepperoni pizzas when you could do something really spectacular like move people from point to point. At this point in his career, he’s already making rupees by the boatload because of investments by the manufacturing sector in the first iteration of zap. He’s got money, he’s got connections, he’s been nominated for nearly every humanitarian award in the history of the humankind.

“So when he starts making calls about this new idea, people say Great! Brilliant! Fantastic! Then they ask what sort of test protocols he’s got designed for something so radical and potentially dangerous. Of course, he doesn’t tell them that he’s already tested it on his dog, and old Barney came out of it (seemingly) okay. Instead, he says that he’s heard about all the fine advances that have been made in biomemetics over the last few years, about package uploads. He says that he’s run all the tests he can, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to subject anyone else to his folly, if that’s what it turns out to be. He’s also heard that this big defense lab in Tennessee is the biomemetics capital of the universe, that they’re claiming they can reliably copy a whole danged person. Rumor has it that they’ve been doing this with politicians for awhile now. If he could maybe get a package of himself in storage, he could just zap himself and prove to the world how safe and useful this technology is with a clear conscience. If he fails, then they can just reconstitute him and its back to the drawing board.”

Raville surged to his feet. He began to pace back and forth in the space between the table and the fireplace. “But what he doesn’t tell them is that he has, in fact, already zapped himself. He knows that it’s safe. Because despite all the great things that have come to him because of zap, and all the things that will come to him in the future, human transport was always the goal from the very beginning. Everything else–the cheap resources, the solution to the hunger crisis, the technological revolution–was just a proof of concept and a way to raise enough capital to survive until this ultimate step could be taken. What are the fundamental principles of zap technology, Ms. Cain?”

Surprised at his self-interruption, Amara stuttered over her answer. “The package must be bona fide before transmission, meaning a pure copy without enhancements, without any mods more invasive than basic genetic therapy. The foam must be accurately configured and the origin and receptor waves synchronized. The zap transform must be certified. And, um…”

“There must be an open receptor node at the end of the transmission,” Dorian finished for her. “An untethered signal is subject to traditional laws of entropy and must necessarily degrade over time without external recodification.”

Raville scudded to a halt and snapped his fingers. “Exactly. But what happens to the package while it is in transit? Where is it?”

“Everywhere,” Dorian said. “In theory, the zap signal passes through every point in the universe at once, and only eventually materializes in the foam that’s been pre-selected to manifest it. Until that time, it’s a chaos waveform. That’s basic quantum information theory.”

Raville snorted. “I’ll assure you that it was anything but basic when I was developing the mathematical laws and building the technology to exploit it, thank you very much.”

“Sorry.” Oddly, Dorian found that he actually meant it. It was easy to forget that this was Michael Raville.

“I came back from Mars with the knowledge for all of it lodged inside my head, exactly how it should work, how the equations would be designed and the devices developed that would make it a reality. All that you have come to take for granted about zap, about the way it has revolutionized the human experience, I foresaw then in pure, prophetic form. It was as real to me coming home from my service with the Franciscans on Mars as your lives are to you now.”

“The Scioli Mission,” Dorian said.

“Yes! Mucking about in the Martian dirt with hard-bitten miners, failed farmers, all of those desperate and starving and abandoned humans, cut off from the planet of their birth, and from a civilization that had not merely forgotten them, but actively disowned them. Let the Martians solve their own problems! That was the cry from Earth governments, from Terran nations who had their hands full trying to feed their own people and stop their own petty wars without being forced to meddle in the affairs of a colony millions of kilometers distant. All that concerned them was the steady flow of resources, and they cared nothing about the rape of this fragile world so recently recovered from the barrenness of ice and fire and solar wind.

“Even if it never been other than a prosaic missionary event, that experience alone would have changed me forever. The constant immersion in so much poverty and misery would have transformed any man with a heart not carved from cold stone. But it wasn’t just depravity that inspired zap. It wasn’t properly inspired at all, not the way you imagine it.

“It was all the old man. It was a gift. And it was just the beginning.”

Raville paused, and Amara managed to catch the corner of Dorian’s eye. He knew what she was thinking. This is where they reached the crazy bit they had been so worried about.

“I think you’d better explain that a little better,” she said.

Raville swung to face them, and his eyes were far away, fixed on some point beyond them, some scene that they could not see. His fingers curled into fists. “I met him on the road between Setra Brahma and North Essex, as desolate a stretch of country as you’ll find on any planet in human space. Low ridges of red Martian rock painted gold and green with recently seeded microbe farms. A cool wind whistling through the storm gullies. Pavonis Mons was barely visible, glinting in thee light of the setting sun like a bloody shard through the everpresent mist that clung to the lowlands. There was Ascraeus to the northeast, Arsia Mons to the Southwest, the three of peaks forming that famous belt the natives call the Triple Sisters of Mercy. I was driving an old Tyogi Quanta, on my way back from the relief station in North Essex, where I’d been delivering hundred kilo bags of rice to the Pater who ran the church there.

“I came upon the old man suddenly. The light was bad, I crested a hill, and there he was, just sitting in the middle of the road, if you could even call it a road. It was really just a pounded dirt track, a road by consensus rather than engineering. Red soil, red ruts that served as my path through the wilderness, that pink and caramel sky, and he wore a pair of brown coveralls, a stained grey shirt. It looked as though he had spent the last hour rolling in the dust. He was lucky I spotted him at all. I missed running him down by centimeters: the width of a thumbnail. I cried out–I probably cursed, in fact–and jerked the wheel on the Quanta and put her straight into a gully, a drop of maybe two meters. The safety foam popped, the engine coughed, made a grinding noise, then quit all together. I remember that sound, you know, that crunch of metal on stone. That sound of collision that you hear inside your mind after an accident; a recollection that is somehow both sound and the sensation of impact? It still bothers me to think about it.

“Oh, I was hot as I kicked the door open. Absolutely livid. I didn’t care if he was starving or delusional or outright insane. I was going to make sure he heard me, you know. That he understood that I was a young man with a future, with a college degree under my belt and a choice graduate school waiting for me. I was somebody, and I was going grand places, and I was toiling away over this year to give something of value back to the human community–toiling for his sake–and he had almost killed me with his madman’s antics.

“I marched up to him and grabbed him by the shoulder, jerked him back a bit so he was forced to lift his head and look me in the eye, to take notice of me, by God. But before I could speak a single word, this old man, he licked his cracked and swollen lips and he said to me, as clear as I’m speaking to you now: Do not be afraid.

“Well, as you can imagine, that was an even bigger piss off than almost killing me in the ditch. I mean, I was ready to rip his God-beloved head off his shoulders, and he’s telling me not to be afraid. Those thin, old man limbs, his fragile bones and parchment skin. I could have broken him like a clay pot. But that was part of it, you see. Because I was afraid. I was terrified that I had injured him. I was terrified that my truck was busted to scrap and I was twenty kilometers from home and stuck out in the middle of the Martian wilderness without any form of protection whatsoever. Even if he wasn’t injured, it wasn’t like I could just leave him there, this sick old bastard, so I was worried about the both of us and how much easier a target we’d be for thieves and marauders than I would have been alone. Don’t get me wrong. I was no saint even in my idealistic youth. I knew I’d have to explain the wrecked truck to Father Hewson, and the only thing that would keep him from killing me over it was this old fool here, and any wrath I might escape by avoiding the old man would be paid me double if I abandoned him out in the middle of nowhere for the next passing vehicle to mash. I was screwed either way, as I saw it.

“So I found myself at a bit of a loss, you could say. But what he said to me next changed the future course of human history. Can you imagine it? The ravings of a mad old man turning the whole universe on its axis.” Raville chuckled to himself. “I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time.”

Dorian sat listening, stiff as stone. He watched Raville the way a hawk might follow the path of a rabbit. But Amara leaned forward earnestly.

“What did he say?” she asked in a quiet voice. “What happened next?”

“He looked at me with the clearest eyes I have ever seen, and he said If though goest down into the darkling lands and bringest the one pearl, which is in the midst of the sea away from the serpent, thou shalt put on thy glittering robe, and thou shalt be content.“ When neither Amara nor Dorian reacted, looking a bit crestfallen, he added, “A metaphor. I did not readily understand it at first, either.”

“Ah, the dreaded metaphor,” Dorian muttered. He was growing weary of Raville’s theatrics.

“He said to me that his name was Eliahu ben Hai, originally from Old Jerusalem in New Mesopotamia and that he had been told to come this place, this patch of emptiness on the barren Martian plain, and to wait for the man he would meet there. And to that man, he was to give a gift.

“From my perspective, what was going on was obvious: he was crazy. I began to fear that maybe I’d tapped him with the bumper after all, but he had no mark on him that I could find. So I helped him to his feet. He was, it turned out, remarkably spry despite his age and the condition in which I’d found him. I stepped back and began to think about checking on the Quanta or finding a way that I might signal for help if the truck was a lost cause. But at that moment, Eliahu reached into himself–not his pocket, I tell you, but into his flesh itself–and brought out this and gave it to me.”

As he spoke, Raville cupped his hand over his chest. His fingers appeared to pass through the wall of ribs and muscle and flesh. The skin parted around a cavity as black as a gravity well, and he drew out an orb of pure, translucent light. It was small, the size of a walnut, but within it the light blazed fierce and glorious, casting rainbows of elemental energy all about the room. The riotous colors burned like liquid fire in his palm, poured from between his fingers, the way an icy mountain stream spills over outcroppings of stone. The light was breathtaking, and Amara gasped. Dorian averted his eyes from the piercing glare.

“The instant I touched it, I knew all that I would ever need to know. I understood the mechanics of the universe itself. For the briefest of moments, it was as though I was inside the mind of God, or perhaps even that the mind of God was inside me. There are no words for it, no language for such an encounter. I only knew that I had entered the fullness, and I contained it. The sense of clarity so pure, so perfect that it should have shattered me. In that instant, I was all things in all places. Unconstrained, unmoored, and I filled the universe.”

“The first zap,” Amara said, startled by understanding.

“Yes.” Raville presented her with a glowing smile. “A true zap, completely unmediated by the technological horrors. I was, as the zaptronauts keep saying, one with the universe. I came face to face, as it were, with beings so far beyond us that they could not be comprehended. It was an experience of what our Mr. Dorian would call pure information. Communication that was all signal, devoid of noise.

“And then it was gone. What remained was merely the memory of that knowing, the shadow of knowledge, the thimble’s weight that my waking mind could actually retain.” Raville shrugged his shoulders as though they could not be expected to understand what he was saying. “I spent the next six weeks with Eliahu in the desert. I left my life behind, the ruined truck, all thought of my friends and family. I followed him to the habitat he had constructed in the caves along Maxima Fatine and stayed with him, learning all that I could about this mystery. Where the gift had come from, how it had come to be, who had given it. Most of all, what it was that they wanted from me.

“Eliahu said that they call themselves the Exousiai, the Helpers, for they had come across great distances to assist us in making the grand leap into our foredestined future. They desired to aid us in sloughing off these garments of flesh, the last and inevitable transition from meat to spirit, from body to mind. They came to set us free from the prison of need and biological imperative. They came to me, just as they had once gone to Georges Nischal and taught him the fundamental mechanisms that would become the Strand. And to Lao Ping, for whom they had unlocked the secrets of matter itself, and showed the wonders that would become nanoscale assembly. Also, to Sperling and Bass and Cuervantes, each in his or her own way contributing essential rungs in the Jacob’s Ladder of progress that led ever up and beyond, into the stars, into the infinite, delivered in a mystery of Light.

“It was to me that they had given the final gift; the last evolution from body to mind, after the foundation had been laid by all the others. Each progressive technological wonder had been a small step, so that our species could encompass them, so that we would have time to adapt to each incremental miracle, so that none would be left behind. It was zap that they reserved until the very last. The end of want, of loss, of death itself.” Raville held the orb aloft, and it’s fierce light dimmed even the rays of the perpetual noon sunlight passing through the windows of the hall. “Everything to which our species has aspired, as a freely given gift. A grace to surpass all others.”

Dorian gave an ugly snort. “They handed you paradise, and you sold it to the megaconglomerates for a bowl of pottage. Nice.”

Raville stared at him. “We revolutionized human experience. We freed mankind from the limitations of our DNA.”

“You exported exploitation to the fringe worlds as a totalitarian yoke of absolute manufacturing and resource control while you and your cronies made yourselves richer than God. You sold yourselves indulgences so you could wallow in a sty of greed and backslapping. They gave you a free gift and you held out for the highest bidder. Face it, Raville, whatever divine vision you may have come out of the Martian wilderness with, you betrayed it long ago. You failed.”

For a few moments, Raville gazed at him blankly. His eyes flickered between the wondrous light of the orb and Dorian’s accusatory glower. Slowly, he lowered the beacon shining in his hand and covered it with his fingers.

“Yes. We did fail.” He shook his head. “I failed. I had the opportunity to touch the infinite, and settled for the merely vast. I was supposed to lead the world into a glorious age, and I turned my back on the vision.”

Breathless, Amara whispered, “But…why?”

“I have no idea.” Raville’s jaws tightened with unexpected bitterness. “I am not my brother’s keeper. Just his bastard copy. I was languishing in a digital deep freeze while he was selling our communal soul, remember?”

“Hold up a second.” Dorian waved his hands in a gesture of denial. “Did it ever occur to you to ask why? Why would these Helpers, the Exousiai–why would they just give us these gifts?”

“Because they are lonely.”

“Lonely?”

“To touch the quae-ha-distra is to touch the soul of the Exousiai, and for all of their wisdom and knowledge and awesome grandeur, the defining characteristic of their being is longing. They long to be no longer alone in the universe. Their answer is to make mere humans into gods, just as they are. Equals with whom they might commune.”

“So what does all of this have to do with Oak Ridge?” Dorian was running out of patience. He wondered if this was how St. James had felt once upon a time, when mad old Paul came trundling back from Damascus toting a revolution they had not foreseen and did not particularly want. When people starated ranting about lights in the sky and gods inside them, the typical human reaction was inevitably the urge to back away. And fast.

“It came to my attention through friends I had cultivated in the Enclave’s administration that there were researches being conducted based upon my early scheme conversion principles that paralleled my own infant experiments with point-to-point human transfer, utilizing biomemetics advances.”

Dorian tried not to laugh. “You were on a mission from God, but some government pinhead beat you to it.”

“Crudely, but yes. They were stretching the limits of biomemetics. There were issues with foam configuration. Poor translations of scheme to fact. Whereas I was tackling those issues before proceeding with actual trials…they were not so patient.”

“You mean Malcolm and Bernhardt,” Dorian said.

“The first zaptronauts?” Amara asked.

“They weren’t prepared to encounter the Exousiai.” An expression like pain crossed Raville’s face, a psychic wince. “Their packages were defective on upload and improperly indexed. There was only the most rudimentary suppression of the qualia. But they remained reasonably sane, enough that the tales they told in their subsequent debriefings led to more researches, more test subjects, most of which did not fare nearly as well.

“Basically, it was happening too soon. The technology was so new; there were still many critics who worried about the impact of digitized object reconstitution on the environment, on social order, on every facet of human commerce and relationship. We required time to adapt to the idea, so that we wouldn’t be afraid. That’s the nature of the human mind, you see? It doesn’t matter how alien the concept or how radical the technology is. We don’t have to understand how something works, or even why it works. Just demonstrate that it is reliable and that it improves the quality of our existence and we will consume it. We’ll make it part of who we are. That’s evolution in progress. All I needed was time.”

Raville showed a flash of anger. His brows gathered like a collision of storm clouds. “But the military was already afraid. They had touched the hem of the Helpers’ garments, and the power they perceived daunted them. Left to themselves, they would have tried to meet power with power, the old human urge to dominate. I knew that. And I also knew that I had to discover what they had learned, and what they planned to do with their imperfect knowledge.” He spread his arms, beseeching them. “I had to spy out their secret counsels and find a way to allay their fears. So I could buy the time that was needed. They were more than happy to have an expert of my caliber at their disposal.”

Dorian got it. He had seen how the spider worked. “So you accessed their findings, their internal documents, everything that Malcolm and Bernhardt had said and you bounced those out to yourself, who then could prepare arguments based on what appeared to be sound, independent reasoning about how the conclusions they were drawing on their own were so wrong.”

Raville only nodded. “The universe is vast, and the mathematics are complicated. It was simply a matter of analyzing their protocols and demonstrating the flaws in their scheme encoding. My actual self was able to assure them that the stream of reports paralleling the experience shared by Malcolm and Bernhardt was an event psychosis with a predictably similar pattern of psychological indications rooted in the nature of the flaws in the scheme design. It was their method that was a fault, not the principles. They wanted to believe, because it is a smaller leap to imagine that our technology had failed than to accept the truth. And so they did believe. The external Michael Raville continued to work with them, guiding them through a combination of his own knowledge and the occasional damage control action when they strayed into dangerous territory. He taught them how to snip the packages, the suppress the emergent consciousness, to anesthetize themselves from the experience of the raw universal voice. I kept him more than adequately informed. I succeeded in the mission for which I was created.”

“But now something has changed,” Amara said, beginning to sound uneasy. “Is that it? That’s what you meant about the end of the world.”

Raville took a deep breath. For the first time, he looked uncertain himself. “Yes. As you can imagine, I’ve kept an eye on myself in the intervening years, following my career with something less than a detached and objective perspective, you might say. I’ve watched myself ascend to the heights of academia, of the political realm, of good old fashioned commerce. I’ve appreciated second hand all of my accomplishments, my successful implementation of human zap. And for sixty years, I’ve asked myself when was long enough? When would our destiny be revealed to the rest of mankind just as it was revealed to us on that dusty Martian road? What has become of our vision?”

Amara answered him in a gentle voice. “Maybe there were problems. Things you became aware of–the real you, I mean–that made the delays inevitable. Or maybe the Helpers contacted you again, said that we weren’t ready.”

“Or maybe you decided there were more important things to do than force evolution on the human race,” Dorian said flatly. “Like amassing enough money to buy your very own private galaxy.”

Raville ignored the jab. “I would love to believe any of those possibilities, Amara. But I can’t.”

“Why not?”

He snapped his fingers and an attractive woman in a black pinstriped business suit appeared on the other side of the fireplace. Dorian recognized her as Marilea Voce, the Strand anchor for the Stratiskaya Daransk Independent News Agency.

And in other news, Turin Sector Allied Command announced that last week’s deployment of the 29th Marine Expeditionary Battle Group aboard the heavy cruisersT.E.S. Juggernaut and T.E.S. Indianapolis is not, as had previously been reported, related to the ongoing territorial dispute between Katurnis Prime and its moon, Tamil Jordan. Speaking on behalf of Allied Command, Enclave Admiral Kobiashi Cho explained in a news conference earlier today that the battle group had been temporarily reassigned by the North American Enclave Prime Minister Ivan Richards with the full cooperation and support of the North American Communal Congress to provide technical support and other services related to the study of emergent singularity burst phenomenon occurring in Sector Phi Sophia being conducted by the Earth Outreach Sciences Organization. Recent studies have suggested that singularity burst clustering may one day provide the solution to Earth’s burgeoning energy needs, and at least one–

Raville waved his hand, and the newswire file vanished.

“So?” Dorian said.

Again, Raville snapped his fingers, and the hall was plunged into darkness. Gradually, spinning points of light emerged from the void and began to cohere into recognizable patterns, logical revolving groups, galactic clusters. Limned with a faint glow, Raville passed through the render of the star map, turning it here and there, refocusing the image, delineating certain sectors, warping others into the background.

“This is Stratiskaya Daransk,” he said, pointing to an aquamarine globe near the edge of the map. For emphasis, he punched up the size of the sector until the planet had the girth of a grapefruit and its dual revolving moons were visible as silver peas spinning in slightly asynchronous orbits. With his index finger, he drew an opalescent line from there, roughly following the outline of the room to a space several paces away. At the end of the line, he placed an arc. “This is Sector Phi Sophia. The arc marks the absolute border of human exploration.”

Dorian said, “Okay. So what’s out there?”

“Nothing of particular interest unless one happens to be an astrophysicist.” Raville frowned. “At least not yet.”

“Then what has the Earth Outreach Sciences Organization so excited?” Amara asked.

“A better question would be, why is it focusing on emergent singularity clustering in that particular sector of space? There are other, much more well-known and catalogued singularity farms within the borders of known space. Why launch a mission all the way out to Phi Sophia?” Raville smiled slyly at them from across the room. “Would you care to guess who is the Advisory Minister for the EOSO?”

“You are,” Dorian answered, once again annoyed with Raville’s sense of theatrics. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Two months ago, and after a great deal of political wrangling, the much delayed Sector Phi Sophia zap depot situated on Kedesma’s small moon Giari Tau went live.” Raville pointed these objects out as he spoke. Kedesma was a massive copper gas giant. Giari Tau was tiny in comparison, grey, and featureless. “Among the first items transmitted to the scientific station was the encrypted scheme for Advisory Minister Michael Raville.”

The physicist tapped his fingers together, looking sheepish. “It happens that the Lead Scheme Auditor for the General Accounting Department of the North American Enclave is a brother Freemason in Alexandria, Virginia. His uploads are invariably a fount of fascinating political trivia.”

“You think the real Raville has called out the Marines?” Dorian asked. “What for?”

“I believe he intends to start a war. To make war on the Exousiai. He has discovered that they are coming at last to fulfill their latent promises, and he believes he has found a means to destroy them.”

<– Chapter 5 / Chapter 7 –>

<– Chapter 6 / Chapter 8 –>

Dorian sat in stunned silence. Raville watched them, a superluminal construct with the shadowy giant Kedesma orbiting his impossible star. Finally, Dorian looked to Amara, and she stared back at him, her eyes large and dark in the wavering light. She had stars in her dark hair; miniature suns burned about her ears. What he wanted to ask her was simple: Do you believe any of this? It was foremost in his mind, but he couldn’t vocalize the question. He was afraid of what she might say.

“You must stop him,” Raville said. “He can’t be allowed to proceed.”

Dorian lifted his head. Very clearly, so that he would not be misunderstood, he asked, “Why not?”

For once, it was Raville who seemed to have no answer. “You would hesitate to stop an interstellar war?”

“If I thought you were a credible source, I might give it some thought. But as it stands, I can’t say I’m feeling particularly motivated, no.”

“I’m telling you what I myself intend to do and you’re telling me that the source is not credible?”

“That’s pretty much it, yeah.”

Raville stood motionless, blinking, as though he could not begin to process Dorian’s argument.

“Even if I did believe you,” Dorian continued, “why should I automatically be opposed to what the actual Michael Raville chooses to do? I mean, by all reports, he’s a sharp guy. He’s powerful, connected, intelligent, seemingly reasonable. Why should I assume that he’s the one being unreasonable here rather than you? Seriously, you’re telling me that an alien civilization as contacted key individuals surreptitiously with the intention of re-making humanity in its own image without most of our input or consent. Even worse, they’ve been dragging us down this road for a hundred years without our knowledge. That makes me a little suspicious, to be honest, and maybe at the end of the day, it made your better half suspicious as well. Maybe he decided he liked being human instead of whatever it is that you or these Exousiai characters think we ought to become that would be so much better for us than what we’ve already got. It makes a whole lot more sense to be wary of strangers bearing gifts than it does to grovel at their feet just because they’ve handed us a few pretty toys and told us they have our best interests at heart. I don’t know about you, but I like being human.”

Amara’s expression grew thoughtful. “But what if he is right, John? If the Exousiai do exist, and if they’re offering these gifts to us, why shouldn’t we share in what we’re becoming? Isn’t this what our whole history has pointed toward? Transcending our human limitations has been our self-proclaimed destiny since we figured out the wheel and the stone axe! We have a chance for the first time to take a premeditated evolutionary leap. Not as victims of a random mutation, but to actually re-make ourselves from a design we choose, to forge our own destiny. There are so many possibilities.”

“And there are no guarantees that any of the possibilities we’d select would be a good thing,” he countered. “We can’t even design our communities to accommodate changes in technology, social trends or economic shifts. We don’t have the kind of foresight it would take to responsibly alter something as complex as the course of human development. Just look at Sonali Real, for God’s sake! Do you really want to turn over our future to the same people who gave that to us?”

“So you’d rather continue to have wars, random violence, jealousy and hatred, all the ongoing symptoms of our personal and corporate disconnection because that’s the way we’ve always progressed?” Amara asked in quiet supplication. “The gift of the Exousiai is the opportunity to be proactive rather than reactive to the events that shape our experience. You act as though you want Sonali Real, as though you’d rather have natural and broken than than new and better just because the change is so different.”

“I’m not saying that,” Dorian said. He didn’t understand why they were arguing about this now. “I’m saying that I don’t trust this notion of some sudden transformation into divinity that will let us just snap our fingers and make all of our problems go away. We’re not equipped to handle that sort of existence. We’re not made for it. It’s too easy an answer, too neat, and I’m suspicious of the myth of progress that seems to permeate zap, nano-assembly, even the Strand–everything the Helpers have supposedly given us.” Dorian jabbed his thumb at Raville. “He says that they’ve given these things to us to prepare us for some glorious appearing. I say that every time they’ve given us something and changed the way we interact with or understand the universe, they’ve unilaterally altered our future by tampering with our natural solution set. They’ve made us more likely the select the outcome they’ve scripted, because that’s the nature of knowledge. Every new piece of information we acquire kills an old way of understanding. Every potential that is actualized snuffs out other potentials that will never be realized and changes the landscape of what we believe is possible, probable or even desirable. That scares me. It feels wrong. It feels like they’re manipulating us.”

Amara furrowed her brow. “You’d throw away humanity’s future because it feels wrong?”

“I’m trying to look at the future objectively rather than confusing opposable thumbs with manifest destiny,” Dorian answered. “The truth is that no matter how fancy our gadgets become or how disconnected we try to imagine we are from meat, from embodiment, we’re still just naked apes playing with increasingly complex sticks who remain inevitably confused by the fact that the world inside our skulls doesn’t match the one outside of it. That’s where we are as humans. That’s our experience, and there’s no guarantee of imminent becoming implied in it; it just is. But that struggle between what we are and what we yearn towards also makes us human, and any fantasy world that denies that reality isn’t healthy. It’s giving answers without having to show your work.”

“Perhaps that was true in the past,” Raville allowed, “but we’re talking about the opportunity to change that, to actually take control of our development, to ascend to heights greater than those to which our biology has limited us.”

“But change it into what?” Dorian insisted. “You say they’re giving us control of our evolution. I say they’re distracting us with goodies so they can control what we become and when we become it. Our ideas of beneficial change and theirs may be completely different when it gets right down to it, and until I know exactly what their agenda is, I’m not particularly interested in jumping on their bandwagon.”

Raville raised his hand and the sunlight returned along with the illusions of the fire’s warmth, the solid furnishings and the seemingly permanent stone walls. He returned to his chair by the fire. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “Maybe we are never going to be anything but exalted apes. Maybe that’s all we’re supposed to be. I, for one, would like to believe otherwise. But what we want to believe changes nothing. The Exousiai exist. I have touched the infinite. I have communed with them. We may very well reject their offer of godhood and continue to toil both at our own pace and in whatever existential directions we desire. They will allow us to do so unmolested, I have no doubt. They may be lonely, but they are not desperate.” Raville’s tone grew hard and determined. “What they will not countenance is war. If Raville attacks them unwarned and unprovoked, if he is allowed to carry out this great evil that he has undertaken, they will come against us with such raging fire that they will scorch the heavens, and if that does not assuage their wrath, they will come again and again until their lust for our blood is sated, or until they have razed the very foundations of human existence. They will exterminate our kind from the universe. I cannot imagine that even you, Mr. Dorian, would wish for such a thing.”

Amara straightened in her seat. “But what can we do, Michael? We don’t have any means of countering someone as powerful as Michael Raville, let alone several thousand Marines.”

Dorian stared at her in horror. “You actually believe him?”

“I do. I want to.”

Raville smiled. “Don’t worry, my dear. I’ve already made provision for that which you lack.” He opened his hand, once again revealing the shimmering orb. “Take this. It is the quae-ha-distra, precious gift of the Exousiai. It will lead you to the knowledge of how we may be saved.”

Dorian leapt to his feet and positioned himself between Amara and Raville’s outstretched hand. “I warned you about this, Amara. Don’t touch it.”

Raville only laughed. “Believe me, Mr. Dorian, this is not the way I would have chosen if other paths had been opened to me, and you certainly would not be my preferred tool for humanity’s salvation. But perhaps you would rather negotiate, yes? Rather than grubbying your own hands with this task, you could simply give me access to the Strand. I could be out of your hair in the blink of an eye and so pass information along to people who would actually be of use to me.”

Dorian growled. “That isn’t going to happen.”

“Then we’re at an impasse. Either you allow me to access the resources I require, or Ms. Cain accepts the orb. There are no other options.”

“Sure there are. We leave. I pull the plug on this foam. Neither one of us burns any more brain cells worrying about this. That’s a more than attractive alternative.”

Dorian’s p2p message system dinged in his ear. Amara whispered to him on the private channel.

/&OpenSess

<I think we should help him, John. I think he’s telling the truth.>

<I have no doubt that he believes he’s telling the truth. I also have no doubt that he’s completely disconnected from objective reality.>

<But what can it hurt to at least see what’s inside the orb? We could take a look and investigate his claims; see for ourselves if there’s any merit to them.>

/&:sigh: <I know you want this to be true, Amara. I understand how this fairy tale could hold some appeal, but you’ve got to open your eyes here. What do you think that orb is? Do you really believe it’s some sort of alien artifact? It’s not. It’s a representation, a render just like he is, and more likely than not, it’s some sort of viral plug. He’ll use it to tap into your interface, shred your cortical matrix and open the window into the Strand that he knows I won’t give him. He said so himself: we’re makeshift allies. He doesn’t want us. We’re just the best tools he can get his hands on at the moment.>

<But what if he isn’t crazy? What if he’s right.>

<Okay, say he’s right. Just as you pointed out: what are we going to accomplish against five thousand Marines?>

<The Marines won’t reach Phi Sophia for six months.> /&whisper <I’m not suggesting we do anything rash, John. Just that we take the orb and do some investigating on our own. We’ve got time, and if there’s something creepy going on, we can put Raville in contact with the proper authorities.>

<It’s a bad idea, Amara. Whatever is going on here–if anything is going on here–it’s between Raville and himself. Certainly not any business of ours.>

<For the kind of hope he’s talking about, it’s a chance I’m willing to take.>

<Wait just a sec->

/&Sysnote: Broken Connex

/&AutoTerm: EndSess

She must have given Raville some signal that Dorian did not see while his attention was focused on their internal messaging. Maybe she had even been running a sideline p2p session with him all along. How she had done it didn’t really matter. What Dorian observed was Raville vanishing from one instant to the next leaving behind an empty chair and a taunting Cheshire grin. In the time it took him to turn himself around to attempt to protect her, Raville had already appeared at Amara’s side. Too late, Dorian lunged at them. He glimpsed the physicist placing his palm against her breast. He saw, or imagined he saw, the cut open there, deep and black like the maw of a shark, just as Raville pressed the orb into her. Amara cried out, a long, keening wail, and her body went rigid.

Raville flashed out of existence again before Dorian could get his hands on him.

He appeared on the other side of the hall at the entrance to far hallway, ready to flee in case Dorian should give chase. But Dorian hardly took account of him. He rushed to Amara’s side and caught her as she fell forward out of her seat. He cradled her head on his arm and set her down gently upon the flagstones. She lay completely still, her eyes open and staring, the pupils tiny black holes. Her chest rose and fell in small hitches; her breath came out in painful gasps. She was pale as marble, lifeless as stone.

“What did you to do her?” Dorian demanded.

But he didn’t wait for Raville to answer. He uncached a dozen antiviral scripts, sorted them by indication and symptom set. They flickered through his hands as syringes, inoculation guns, silver scalpels as sharp as razors. Too late, he remembered that he had no way to deliver them. They were off the Strand, and the narrow bandwidth of the p2p pinhole wouldn’t be sufficient for any significant antiviral transfer.

“I haven’t harmed her,” Raville called out. Even as he spoke, her breathing eased and color slowly began to seep back into her cheeks. “She’s in no danger. It just takes a moment for her array’s firmware operating system to adapt to the code matrix. It’s a configuration pause, that’s all, much worse in render than in actuality. Just leave her alone, and she’ll be fine.”

Dorian scoured her features for signs he wouldn’t have been able to interpret even if he did detect them. He needed to see the code that underlay her virtual image to undertand what Raville had done, what poison was contained in the orb package. But off the Strand and contained in their own virtual shells, all he had was the uncertain interface of her render to tell him what was going on. And it looked as though it was deeply contemplating dissolution. His mind buzzed with the catalogue of all the diagnostic tools at his disposal, and his thoughts scattered down rabbit holes of problem solving: how he would open her up, how he would extract this thing from her matrix before it burned anything up, all the things he could do to save her.

But it was pointless here and now. He was powerless until he could get her out of this frozen foam and into a true interactive environment. And he couldn’t get her out of the locked node without leaving her in order to dump the session connections from the admin panel. He wasn’t about to do that, to leave her at Raville’s mercy. Until she was sufficiently self-cognizant to flash herself out of geek and get herself into a Strand session where he could access her core, she was closed to him.

He didn’t have any help to offer. Not here, not like this.

Without taking his eyes off of her, he barked at Raville. “What is it doing? I warn you: tell me step by step so I can back it out, or you’ll pay.”

“It is the quae-ha-distra. She has nothing to fear.”

“No, it isn’t,” Dorian growled back. “It’s code. It is a hostile application feasting on her foam matrix. It isn’t real.”

“Of course it’s real,” Raville said with exasperating calm. “Anything the human mind accepts as reality is reality. We define reality by what we encompass. We build it from the raw material of our desires. There is no difference between the Strand and the world, the foam and the world, except the difference you make for yourself. Her belief is the only thing that enables the orb to work.”

Amara unleashed a sharp, hacking cough that twisted her in Dorian’s arms. He struggled with her for a few moments, then let her go. She curled up on her side with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head turned away from him. She made a retching sound deep in her throat, and her jaws opened reflexively as though she was going to vomit. When the spasms had passed, and she lay still with her eyes closed, but her chest rising and falling in a regular, unstrained rhythm.

In a small voice, she said, “I’m fine, John. I’m…really. Okay.”

Dorian crouched on his knees above her, his hands anchored on his thighs, and exhaled his relief. He cast a baleful glare at Raville but said nothing as Amara gingerly pushed herself first to a sitting position, then levered against the sofa and coffee table, and climbed unsteadily to her feet.

“My hands are numb,” she said.

“It will pass,” Raville answered her. “Perhaps a touch of dizziness, some blurred vision, nausea. Session variables that will remain here after you leave. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Amara took a deep breath, carefully it seemed to Dorian, as though she feared even the act of breathing would upset her fragile balance. When she did falter, he sprang to her side to catch her. She clung to his arm for support and allowed him to ease her back onto the sofa.

“I’m okay,” she said again, but her grip on his arm remained fierce, frightened. “I just need a second to clear my head.”

“Why didn’t you listen to me?” He took her chin in his fingers and peered into her eyes, then turned her head from side to side. He had no idea what he was looking for.

She patted his hand to reassure him, then began to rub her temples with her fingertips.

Small circles, Dorian thought. Happy circles.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said to Raville.

Amara froze, stiff and sudden. “I can hear…singing?”

“Yes, the voices of the Helpers calling out to you,” Raville said, clearly pleased.

“And I feel tingly.” Dorian could feel her trembling against him. She flexed her fingers over and over, as though she was testing their function. “It’s strange. It tickles.”

Raville eased tentatively across the hall. “What can you see, my dear?”

“Lights? No. Forms. Shapes of some kind?”

Dorian saw nothing, heard nothing, but he continued to watch Amara. Her brow furrowed with concentration. She squinted in the direction of the fire, but her pupils did not focus. They scanned the wall from side to side like spotlights searching out a hostile aircraft. Whatever it was she could see occupied no world that Dorian was a part of.

“The Exousiai,” Raville assured her. “Go to them, if you can. Or call out to them.”

“They’re coming.”

“Yes.”

Amara’s voice dropped to a whisper. “They’re—it’s–so…huge.”

A shiver rippled through her body. Dorian said, “Amara?”

“I see them!” she cried. “Oh, John, I see them! I–”

She swung her head toward him, and she threw her arms wide, her hands spread as wide as her fingers could manage. She gripped his shoulders and squeezed. The intensity of the render interface translated as a sensation of pain. “They’re coming to me, John! They’re–”

There were lights in her eyes, as bright and naked as newborn stars. Dorian pressed his hands against the sides of her face, tried to make her focus on him.

“Amara!”

She uttered a single, piercing scream, then popped out of existence. Only the echo of her voice remained, reverberating off the virtual stone walls. Dorian clutched at the empty space where she had been.

He lurched to his feet, then wheeled to face Raville and snarled. “What just happened? Where did she go?”

“Do not fear, Mr. Dorian. She’s well enough.”

“Well—What kind of answer is that? Well enough!”

Ignoring Dorian’s roar of outrage, Raville clasped his hands behind his back and made his way back to the alcove. He walked ponderously, gazing at the floor, his chin lowered almost to his chest. When he reached his chair, he fell into the seat and propped his feet on the table. He looked physically exhausted. “I’ve expelled her from the environment with a mental soporific to ease her transition.”

“What are you talking about?”

Raville waved his hands lazily. “A gradual, guided slide back to normal cognition. I don’t know what you call them now.”

“A synaptic bridge,” Dorian said, grunting. He willed himself to relax. It was something, at least, an indication that there was something else behind his madness than pure malice.

“Amara is fine for the moment. I want you to believe that. The sequence by which the orb must be integrated into human consciousness is admittedly harsh, I’ll grant you. It is uncomfortable to have one’s perception of reality and the structures that underpin it turned completely upside down. Some existential dissonance is to be expected, and in a purely virtual environment, that dissonance will manifest as apparently physical discomfort. But I wouldn’t ever do anything intentionally to harm her. She’ll be out for a bit while she correlates this event in a meaningful way, but she’ll emerge essentially whole.”

“Essentially.”

Raville grimaced. “You must trust me. You said yourself that her experience wasn’t real, as you define it. I suppose there is a grain of truth in that. The Exousiai she encountered were a simulated event object, as near as I could come to the actual thing with my clumsy skills. The copy of a copy, as it were, or an interpretation of the ineffable, inherently lacking the original’s particular grace. She was awed, but not overwhelmed. There’s a significant difference.”

Raville looked toward the fire and did not speak for a time. He looked increasingly drawn and weary, and Dorian had to remind himself that the construct was not real. This render was for his benefit. Finally, the package said, “Besides, this is as much your fault as it is mine. Your arrogant refusal to even listen to what I had to say put her in a position where she felt like she had to do something drastic.”

“I’m not even going to respond to that.”

“That’s fine. It’s really beside the point. The actual point, however, is that she has, in fact, done something drastic that I did not originally intend for her to do alone, nor can she perform the task set before her by herself. As much as I like sweet Amara, you and I both know that she doesn’t have the training or the hardware to make sense of the code with which I’ve infected her.”

Dread tightened Dorian’s belly. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means, my friend, that your involvement has been co-opted with or without your consent. I’ve said that I don’t intend to harm her, but the bottom line is that whether or not she comes to harm is really dependent upon you.”

Somehow, he hadn’t expected anything less. “Go on.”

“Even as we speak, the quae-ha-distra has begun to execute a sophisticated load mapping of a highly secure proprietary foam target whose address has been hard coded into the orb application itself. This procedure will place her at considerable risk mentally, physically and perhaps legally if her intrusion is detected.”

Dorian closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Raville had plugged Amara unprepared into a hostile environment running any number of barrier defense scripts. That wasn’t just cruel as he reckoned such things, it was evil.

“Whose?”

Raville smiled weakly. “Mine, of course.”

For some stupid reason, this made perfect sense to Dorian. “What could you possibly have been thinking in sending her in there by herself?”

“I told you, my boy, this is not the way I had envisioned events unfolding at all. I had hoped to enlist your support without these strong arm tactics and such unnecessary drama. You could have protected her, at least to some extent, from the inherent risks of such a task. Nevertheless, part of living—even in this truncated existence—is adapting to circumstances. My adaptation was to place you firmly between the proverbial rock and its related hard place.”

“Stop pontificating and just tell me what you’ve done to her.”

Raville sighed as though Dorian’s inability to understand pained him. “I have made her my spider to obtain the information that I require to stop my better half from bringing about the end of days. Unconscionable, I know, but someone had to do it, and with my unique assistance and your skill set to shield her, she stands as good a chance of getting away with it as any. The orb itself will protect her from immediate harm–it has been keyed to the security of the foam it will be extracting–but it is a perilous environment. Difficult to integrate consciously. The foam definition that is being loaded into and connexed with Amara’s array is for an environment that is not strictly human foam in any way we understand the word. It is very nearly something else entirely, a gift from the Exousiai that accompanied the true quae-ha-distra when it was given to me. This specially configured dataverse serves as a channel through which the Exousiai may interact with its human bearer, even in our naturally degraded state. It is a place where many things can exist that are not possible with our understanding of quantum foam. A magical land. Think of it rather as an intermediary space, neither here nor there, but somewhere in between. It acts as a translation device between Exousian purity and human frailty, being both less than they are, but more than us. The orb Amara now possesses opens access to this theoretical space between their world and ours. It is a massive, frightening, bewildering place that she has been allowed to enter. She will require some assistance to extricate herself safely.”

“Oh, that’s much better than just giving her some brain-scraping crud,” Dorian spat. He felt a growing urge to break something, starting with Michael Raville. “Now tell me how to get her out of it.”

But Raville held up a hand to stop him. “There’s more that you must understand. The problem, as you might already have guessed, is that though I call it mine, I am not the sole consumer of this particular foam. In fact, I have not been any sort of consumer of it since I left Oak Ridge, and even then my access was passive, a mechanism for transmitting the data I uncovered back to my actual self without the danger of trying to secret it across their secure metwork. True immersive access, full access, requires the mediation of the Strand, you see.” There was a note of longing in Raville’s voice, an expression of deep and hungering loss. “That was one of the things I surrendered when I accepted this incarnation. Its control has passed into the hands of my actual self alone. But the moment the quae-ha-distra entered with Amara into a live Strand environment, it began extracting and synchronizing certain key data representations from that specially configured foam environment to a more readily accessible sector appendant to Amara’s personal foam. It is attempting to fulfill its potential, to become what it wants to be, which is nothing less than a direct conduit between the I and Thou, man and god. It will enable her to enter that Holy of Holies and commune with the divine.”

“You mean it could make her as crazy as you?”

Raville did not rise to the insult. “The foam is perilous, but to some extent only immediately and fleetingly so. The real danger is Raville himself if he determines who it is that has breached his defenses. You must find Amara within the storm she has entered, extract her from it, and then hide all evidence of her intrusion. Raville cannot know that she was ever there, cannot even learn her name, or she is doomed.”

“How long will the orb’s security keys be able to protect her before that ruse breaks down?”

“The key synch protects her only from the foam’s automated defenses. Those are not the problem. My actual self believes that as the bearer of the quae-ha-distra no one can touch the sacred foam but himself. Thus, he no doubt became aware that his foam was being breached in the instant the load mapping began. Any external incursion would alert him.”

“But he’ll think it’s you,” Dorian said hopefully. “You’re the only one who could have knowledge that the foam itself existed, let alone possess the access key, other than him.”

Raville shrugged. “That may be true, and it may distract him for a time, though I would not be surprised if he has forgotten that I even exist. He certainly doesn’t expect that I have retained consciousness outside of Oak Ridge, and on that basis, he would rightly understand any attempt by my profile to enter the sacred foam as an attack. He will be aware at first only that his foam repository has been accessed. He won’t particularly care who it is, I think, only that the intruder be stopped from digging too deeply and uncovering his secret heart. That is our window of opportunity, Mr. Dorian, the time it takes him to collect his wits. Because once he has them, I can assure you that it won’t take him long to disassemble the orb application’s logic to get at the transmitting array’s logfile and trace Amara’s originating id. I would be disappointed if it took him more than a few minutes. He wrote the code, after all.”

“And knowing this, you still gave it to her. You still let her go into danger.” Dorian thought once more about shoving his fist down Raville’s throat, but it wouldn’t have done any good. “You’re unbelievable.”

“I did what had to be done to obtain the information that we require to save our species from destruction. I shouldn’t have to defend myself to you. You’d have done the same if the stakes were high enough.”

“I would have at least warned her about what she was getting herself into.”

“No, you would have talked her out of it, or failing that, you would have followed her inside to protect her, which happens to be the same decision placed before you now. Let us establish that I am a very bad man who uses poor, unsuspecting people for his own gain and move on, shall we?”

Dorian shook his head. “What’s inside this foam that’s so important?”

“Everything I have ever known about the Exousiai, about zap, about the true and secret nature of the universe itself. “

“Including the reasons why you’re trying to destroy them now?”

“Such is my hope. You can see why the living Raville will be very unhappy that Amara has trespassed in his private sanctuary. It is for us a sublime place, a spiritual haven and a storehouse for all of our private thoughts. If there is a way to stop him, the knowledge of his weakness will be there. That is why he will defend his foam so zealously. You can also imagine, I suppose, how you would respond if someone had invaded your personal, proprietary data environment?”

“I don’t have to imagine, remember?” Dorian snapped.

But that didn’t stop him from doing so, and worse, from envisioning the sort of cortical damage Amara would sustain if she was still connected to Raville’s rogue foam when he went after her. Raville probably had a dizzying variety of cutters, virals and wet-targetting malware apps at his disposal. Not shelf-product scripts either, but the sort of elite homebrewed or private contract poisons that never made the newswire because they were deployed only against heavily fortified conglom or government targets and the victims wouldn’t dare talk about it for fear of losing credibility. “I hate you. Have I said that yet?”

“How you may feel about me is immaterial. The only question that remains is what you plan to do next. Will you save your friend, or will you let her die? Will you aid me, or will you try to walk away and doom us all? What will you do?”

“What I intend to do is burn this place to the ground, and you with it,” Dorian said flatly. “But later, after this thing is over. You and I will settle up accounts, though. Make no mistake.”

A sardonic smile crossed Raville’s lips. “Be assured that I both hear and believe you, Dorian. I would caution you not to be too hasty with your threats, however. You might find that I may still be of some use to you in the future.”

“Not likely,” Dorian muttered, but without any real force of conviction. It would be an argument for another time. He checked his system clock. Amara had been gone for almost eight minutes.

Sighing, he resumed his seat. “Tell me everything you know about this application you’ve set loose inside my friend.”

What other choice did he have?

As if he relished driving Dorian insane, Raville answered, “I’ll have to just hit the highlights. You’ve wasted so much time that we don’t have much to spare.”

<– Chapter 6 / Chapter 8 –>

<– Chapter 7 / Chapter 9 –>

It really wasn’t much better outside than it had been inside. Dorian stood over Amara as she sat slumped in her office chair at the back of his cubicle, where she’d drawn it up before they had assayed Raville’s foam. For comfort, she’d said, physical proximity to take the edge off the fear of a hostile and alien scape. Even in anticipation, there had been fear. As if she had known.

He should have kept her closer. He should have been more careful.

He studied her now: arms hung limp at her side, legs splayed out in front of her, her head lolled to the side. She appeared to be sleeping, and quite soundly. A sleep as profound as death. Dorian lifted her eyelids and peered at the reptilian slits beneath. They shuttered closed in response to the light. Her moist nostrils quivered gently with each breath. He supposed that was good, the fact that she was still breathing. Her scales presented at room temperature, and he didn’t know if that was good or bad. He had no way to diagnose her in this form, except to finally put his head against her chest and listen for the firm, steady beat of her heart. That much had escaped modification, it seemed. He stroked the long, fine hair on her head, and she appeared to smile in her sleep. He had no way of knowing how deep her hurts might penetrate, or if she had even been harmed at all.

He had no choice but to trust Raville, which was doubtless exactly what Raville had wanted all along.

He stepped back and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. He couldn’t afford to dwell on her condition any longer. He had work to do. Evil things, and it was just as well that Amara would be asleep for them.

So he left her for a time to rummage about the shelves that lined his office space, scavaging bits and pieces of equipment he had stockpiled there over the years. Things he had shoved to the back, up against the wall, covered with canvas: wave analyzers, delta parsers, heavy quantum bomb res imagers. He spent a few minutes plunged in his private foam, digging into insanely encrypted storage vaults for the sorts of scripts, jack-abouts and streamhacks that could get a man’s implants confiscated, his geek permanently suspended. Artifacts of forbidden magics so black that the possession of them alone was punishable by life plus fifty in a maximum security prison. The raw materials of an anarchist revolution.

He’d been taught to do this once, a lifetime ago it seemed sometimes, in the Special Operations Service, one of the more infernal divisions of the Border Marines. How to peel a man open like a grape, sort his being neuron by neuron, then eat him alive from the inside out. How to insidiously inject logic chains that eventually altered synaptic pathways, changed the fundamental essence of a person’s identity. How to construct and implant viral bombs that not only shattered genetic encoding, but were so insidiously engineered that they weren’t triggered until a package upload process had been initiated. So that the infection followed the target wherever he went, carried in his own corrupted identity matrix, the closest thing that remained to a death sentence in a world that offered the simulated potential of eternal life to whoever could afford it.

Raville had accused him of being paranoid. If he’d known half the things Dorian knew about data terror and core manipulation, he would have been amazed that the whole universe wasn’t bloody paranoid. Anyone could kill another man’s body. Meat was soft, vulnerable, and ultimately disposable, no matter how heavily one modified it. It took a special kind of training and an especially deviant ruthlessness to destroy his pleroma–his fullness, his richness, his complete data being. Those were the skills Dorian had picked up during his military service.

He rapidly assembled his equipment. Raville had only promised him the better part of half an hour, so there wasn’t time to waste. He attached the thin metal band of the res cap to Amara’s skull and ran it through the base calibrations. Flipping into geek, he drilled down into his foam and unlocked the door to one of his many private chambers. This one was especially secure, though it rendered like any of the others as pale and anonymous hardwood. It would take a particularly clever and invasive data map for any external audit of his foam to even trace the extent of its defenses. But it was wicked ice beneath the veneer, laced with trolls, direct core virals and vector-shunt wormholes that could bog down a whole flotilla of icebreak servers, if the need arose.

Inside was his control room, lined with monitors and display screens, a disorienting array of blinking lights, toggle switches and faux-electronic paraphernalia. One by one, Dorian switched on the virtual representations of equipment he would need. The underlying wave synchronization scripts those objects metaphored began to execute. Somewhere in his soft tissues, his military-grade seenop processors sprang to life and began to coordinate with the tight beam signal being emitted from the res cap. On one of the screens, waveforms began to appear: gently sloping alphas, stuttering betas, the majestic whorls of delta graphed in triDvid. The strange and wondrous patterns of Amara’s mind. As the feed volume increased beyond preset event thresholds, it triggered bandwidth sensors, and more applications came online–whole banks of equipment designed to suppress and baffle and disguise his activities coughed and clattered and lurched to life, filling the room with the stench of ozone. Dorian felt himself bathed in the sinister glow of electron guns.

He cursed under his breath and flipped back into the realtime.

Remembering wasn’t hard, which disturbed him. The first parser locked here, just above the ridge of the orbital bone. The second on the spur of bone behind the left ear. The heavy binary streamjack locked on at the base of the skull where it could tap the faint emissions from the cortical array’s processor.

Maybe it was just because he’d done it so often, once upon a time. No matter.

Back into the control room, he tracked his progress, scribbled quick equations. Watched and waited for his foam to accumulate enough signal data to allow him to map the terrain of her pleroma, to make his virtual world and her s one and the same in perfect synchronicity. He loaded complex anonymizers that rippled through deflection algorithms like a tiger stalking through tall grass. Dorian became a thief in the night, prowling secret places where he had no business being. He was doing this for Amara’s sake, he told himself. For Amara. And it made him feel better for just a moment, even if it was only partially true.

The proximity sensor tracking the wave normalization between his foam and Amara’s gave a warning buzz. Wave synchronization alerts flashed. A woman’s voice came from hidden loudspeakers, counting down from five. He shivered with a sudden spike of the old, bitter surge of anticipation. When the count hit one, Dorian fired off his full battery of decryption hacks, augmented by hardcore black skeleton keys.

And he bounced.

It was a ride through lightning. He plummeted through chaos space, arms folded back at his sides, wind stinging his eyes. A human projectile following a silver skein as wide as the trunk of a sapling oak. He felt himself soaring at a great height, far above clouds and land and sea, enveloped in mist and storm, but falling, falling, his diagnostic and synesthetic adaptors buzzing inside his skull. Code structure variations and variable overlaps dappled his vision with slaps of riotous color that burst like fireworks and faded, formed phantasms that refused to cohere within his triDvid engine protocols. Dorian’s stomach lurched as he banked his shoulders against a current shift in the downstream, defied the laws of physics themselves to keep the skein beside him. Encoded auditory and visual-mem storage blocks bled into the smooth, if chaotic render where Raville’s code had failed to eclipse Amara’s inherent architecture. Flashes of inchoate experience exploded around him like peals of thunder. A girl’s laughter. Flashes of awareness around him like strokes of thunder. A shabby room, a tumbledown dollhouse, a persimmon colored kitten. A pink satin dress and furtive, clusmy kisses. More that he tried not to see, willed himself to forget.

This was Amara’s foam at the basic level, beneath even her own organizational architecture. The datastream jacked from her personal synaptic rhythm, synchronized with her cortical array, keyed to her private foam. It was a snapshot of her naked soul.

Data, he told himself. Just data.

The atmosphere thickened. He plunged into plastic, midnight water, felt himself buffeted by waves, and still he fell, down and down. There were monsters here. Colossal squids with eyes like dead pools and immense, grappling arms; thunderous beasts iridescent in the depths, perilous with fangs. A memory of screams, tearing, the phantom pain of limbs and loves and innocence he did not possess. Dorian flinched away.

I’m sorry, he thought reflexively. Forgive me.

And finally, finally, a blaze of white so pure that it’s glow refracted through the water in detonations of rainbows a kilometer wide and as dense as rock. The hole in the bottom of the sea. A crevasse between twin, craggy ridges, penetrated by the skein. It was a default object render of the appendant foam construct Raville had described. The portal into an alien dimension. He fell toward it at an impossible velocity.

And suddenly, Dorian burst from darkness into light.

There was a terrifying sensation of freefall, of gathering speed. His limbs seemed to pinwheel, and he squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, trying to orient himself. But there was too much scope, too much space. This place, this foam was massive. It was a galaxy unto itself, and the mere size of it dazzled him. He plummeted out of control toward a crystalline dome of such grand dimensions that it appeared to have no curve at all, and the only imperfection in its seamless surface was the stem of the silver skein poking from a navel at its apex.

The dome grew in his perspective until it was all he could see. Dorian braced himself.

He didn’t have the key to pierce the perimeter locks. He didn’t want one. He had other business with this foam.

But it was going to hurt. There was no way around it.

He slammed into a wall of ice that splintered his bones, pulped his flesh. He dissolved into scarlet atomic mist. He imagined that he heard one great primal scream that shivered the fabric of reality. Or maybe it was just his own.

And in that agonized, glaring instant before the coherence scripts reassembled him, Dorian glimpsed the Exousiai. Their lumbering immensity, their eyes like naked fire, their ponderous and eternal thought-forms. Their sacred I Am.

His fractured metacomponents devolved into functional units: routine jackbots, core mapping bores, terragenic exploratory spiders. Behind them came flash icepicks and decryption drills, then extractors and parsers and dynamic defense mechs. Last of all was the necessary phalanx of log scramblers and id masks, both for himself and for Amara. A desperate, hopeless ploy.

He dissolved and was gone…

…back into a world he understood. By the time he bounced into his control room, the work was well underway, and the raw data mapping results were beginning to filter through the system and into his pre-defined hazardous content bubbles.

He had ridden Amara’s private geek into the underlying directory structure for Managed Index Protocol Address 14.17.266-Neg-087.9. Her own personal data haven, transformed by the implanted seed of Michael Raville’s treachery into something else—a door between worlds. But whatever it was, whatever it had become, it was Amara’s secret place, and he had invaded it without her knowledge or consent.

Dorian went to work extracting Amara from the pit into which she had fallen.

When he was done, he deployed a final script, one Raville had borne with him into the Infocache. He’d told Dorian exactly where to find it in the dead port storage net before they had parted. It was, he explained, a vicious sub ex-connex tether saw, and when Dorian unleashed it, it split the silver skein between the world of the Exousiai and Amara, Amara and the quae-ha-distra, the infinite and the merely virtual, like a sword through silk.

She was free at last, and if the only cost for it was a little self-hatred, Dorian would count himself lucky.

Amara awoke with a flutter of eyelids and some careful stretching. She sat up straight and looked around her as though taking stock of her environment. There was only the faintest glimmer of bewilderment in her eyes, the expression of someone who has fallen asleep unexpectedly and roused themselves too suddenly from a strange dream.

Dorian was there at once with a mug of hot coffee pressed into her hands. She accepted it gratefully, and set about blowing at the steam until it was cool enough to drink. Dorian watched her, feeling all at once distant, tentative and terrified almost out of his mind. The latter feeling did not begin to dissipate until she had knocked out half the mug of coffee without showing any inclination toward collapsing.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Late,” he said, then corrected himself. “Early. It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours. We were in there longer than I expected.”

“I had the oddest dream,” she began.

“How do you feel now?”

“Stiff. Like I slept in a chair for way too long. I think my butt is still asleep.”

He wanted to ask her about the orb, about her experience with the Exousiai, but he couldn’t, not without admitting what he knew, what he had done. Instead, he said: “I should take you home. Get you something to eat, then into bed.”

Amara put her had against her stomach and grimaced. “No food, I think. I’m a bit queasy.”

“Just home and bed, then.” Raville had said there would be consequences, and Dorian didn’t want to sound maternal. He also didn’t want to point out that he had warned her. Repeatedly. “I’ll get your coat.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you used to be a soldier?” Amara asked suddenly.

He froze as he retrieved her jacket from the coat rack, then pushed himself into motion again. He was afraid to ask how she knew such a thing. Data leakage had been know to occur between control and target; sometimes, if you weren’t careful, you gave as much as you took, and as easily as he had seemed to remember, he was still rusty. Clumsy.

“Raville told me,” she went on, as though she had read his thought. Not leakage then, just more of Raville’s treachery. He was glad her back was to him, so that she couldn’t have seen him falter. “It came as a complete surprise to me, but he was very clear on that point.”

“It wasn’t ever relevant,” he said, holding his voice steady only with some effort. “The law stipulates four year mandatory enlistment here in one of the sector services for all natural citizens. The only choice you have is the branch of service. The government thinks it’s a good way to build a homogeneous cultural experience.”

“We didn’t do that on Sae Phen. There weren’t really enough of us to make much of a security force anyway.”

Dorian didn’t comment. He’d been to Sae Phen, or at least to the Marine Training Facility down south at St. Ugard’s Bay. It still counted as the worst consecutive thirty-six weeks of his life. Constant combat drills, sleep deprivation, wave after wave of implantation, augmentation and subsequent device training. The flight over, six weeks crammed into the belly of a rustbucket cruiser, had been a horrific exercise in social dominance theory all on its own, and his first impression of the planet as he’d glimpsed it (crowded with fifteen other musket monkeys against a grubby porthole) had not been a promising one. A tiny frozen marble, it had seemed. A pearl set in ebony.

The actual experience had been even worse than the impression. The cold was blistering, pervasive, inescapable. The only people who lived on Sae Phen, outside the permanent Marine trainers and facility staff, were blue ice miners and harsh hab academics-slash-environmentalists of a notoriously radical bent. Academie Waldenaise was, by reputation at least, the most rigorous and accomplished biological research university in human space. That was the only thing the dismal rock had going for it. Otherwise it was a wasteland of desolation. Dorian never made it to Aldentag where the university was. Musket monkeys weren’t allowed off the training installation until after graduation, and by that time, no one wanted to go anywhere but home or hell or any moderately temperate zone in between where they didn’t have to worry about having to crack the scum of ice out of their hair if they took too long toweling off after their shower.

“What branch did you choose? You said you were given a choice, right?”

“Border Marines. Fifteenth Expeditionary Force.” They had been called the Icebreakers, but he wasn’t about to tell Amara so. Too many questions. “I wanted to make sure that when I got out, I was the toughest guy in my neighborhood.”

Amara turned her chair. Her eyes were bright, wide. “Then you’ve been to Sae Phen!”

“Only the awful parts.”

“That’s pretty much everywhere,” Amara joked, then relented: “No, that’s not true. The hab domes to the North, beyond Gideon’s Circle, aren’t so bad. They were mostly reserved for high whuffie visiting scholars, but in the off-peak season, the university held a timeshare lottery for the staff. It was very cold, nothing but blue ice as far as you could see, but the accommodations were luxurious, at least by Sae Phen standards.”

“Your parents were academics?”

“My mother. Xenobiospherics.”

“And your father? What did he do?”

Amara shrugged awkwardly. “My mother was something of a free spirit.”

“Ah.” Dorian changed the subject. “So, did you study at Academie Waldenaise?”

“Not technically. I was tutored by resident scholars one on one. Most of the researchers had already raised their children or were morally opposed to procreation of environmental grounds. There weren’t really enough children about at any one time to justify a proper educational system, so those who were willing took a turn advising us in their specialties. By the time I was ready to get out of there and see something of the universe, I was three or four years ahead of other kids my age academically. The Admissions Dean at Cambray in Atcheson City just about choked on my letters of recommendation.”

Dorian couldn’t help but laugh. “You left the most prestigious university in human space to study here? They must have thought you were crazy.”

“It wasn’t a rational decision. I was at an age where I just knew I needed to get out on my own, with people my own age. People who had normal, banal interests. People who weren’t all a hundred and fifty years old and had enough letters after their names to choke a print cartridge. My mother understood this, I think, so she allowed me to leave, but made me promise to stay in-system, at least for my First Flight coursework. She wanted me close, I guess. In case I got into trouble.”

It was a generational thing, Dorian supposed. Zap had made the concept of distance all but obsolete, but their parents had never really been able to get their minds around the reality, even if they did develop a fundamental acceptance of its utility. They came to use it, but they never successfully integrated it into their consciousness. Of course, it wasn’t like pointing out examples of arbitrary logic to one’s mother ever did any good, anyway. Dorian’s mother still hadn’t forgiven him for not joining the Naval Support Agency instead of the Border Marines. She hadn’t known anything about the NSA except that Betty McCurdy’s son Charlie from down the block had enlisted with them, and he’d spent his entire two year stint in Sonali, coming home on weekends and sleeping in his old bedroom. He’d tried to explain to her that this was largely because Charlie McCurdy was a jerk-off dork whose official military job classification was Drooling Idiot, but his mother had been unable or unwilling to grasp it. Elaine Dorian hadn’t even come down to the port to see him off when he’d straggled aboard the Intrepid for the trip to Sae Phen.

“Raville said you served for eight years,” Amara said. “I guess you liked it.”

“I didn’t have any say in it,” Dorian explained. “The Defense Staff suspended retirements during Hamers-Doss Insurrection, and unfortunately for me, my tour was up about that time. After that, I just had work to do, I guess. It seemed important at the time.”

“Were you infantry?”

“No.”

“That’s where you picked up all this security agent mojo, yes?”

“Some of it.”

“So did you see any action in the Insurrection?”

“No.” Not the sort she was imagining, at least.

Amara frowned. “This isn’t something you like to talk about, is it?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean to pry.”

“Of course you do. It’s what you do best.”

Amara laughed. “Fine. Keep your secrets if you want, but just so we’re clear, yesterday evening was officially the last time I walk you home, Mr. Border Marine. It’s fairly obvious that you engaged my services under false pretenses.”

Dorian held out her coat and helped her slip her arms into the sleeves, then collected his own jacket. Amara took one last look around the office, as if she was afraid she was forgetting something. Finally, she asked, “What did you do with Raville?”

“He’s safe.”

“You didn’t delete him?”

“Not yet.” Dorian put his arm around Amara’s waist and ushered her out the door. “But that doesn’t mean that I won’t.”

“You’re just a big ball of gooey goodness beneath that thorny exterior after all,” she said, grinning. “I knew it.”

He grunted. “Don’t push me, lizard girl.”

They went out into the hall and Dorian flashed his security pins at the geek reader to lock the door behind them. The corridor was bare cinderblock painted an industrial shade of two-tone gray. Recessed florescent tube lighting in the ceiling turned everything that wasn’t gray an unflattering shade of lavender. Wiring conduits and heat taped plumbing pipes lined the walls like irregularly spaced ribs. The Archive was a glorious architectural structure. The style was a subtle hybrid of Mediterranean domes and old European Gothic arches. The builders had favored flying buttresses and acres of stained glass, sprawling wings with Doric columns and high ceilings, dark marble facades and burnished hardwood floors. If anything, the render that served as their public face was less impressive than the building on which it was based. But down here in the basement, most of what Dorian saw was the straightforward and functional ugliness of a utilitarian space. That had always seemed fitting to him.

He and Amara stuck to service corridors as much as possible, partly because it was easier to get to the parking garage this way, partly because there were more security sensors upstairs and sometimes the cleaning crews smudged the lenses so that their broadcast security pins didn’t register accurately, and then poor Mike and Ridley on the night watch had to argue about who would go check out the disturbance in the grid.

They avoided the elevators for the same reason and took the stairwell on the west side of the building up six flights to the third floor. The door there opened onto an unimposing staff corridor–unimposing in Archive terms, which meant parquet floors, vaulted ceilings and tasteful art prints as far as the eye could see. To the left was a heavy steel security door that led to the enclosed plexsteel skyway that spanned the street between the Archive and the garage.

Dorian stopped the stairwell door with his foot before it locked behind them and knocked his head against the frame a couple of times. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but I just remembered that I promised Old Man Hill that I’d reset the tamper locks on the ex-connex router in Conference Two. He’s got Masonic brass geeking in for a quarterly meeting first thing in the morning and they’ve got to hold a formal Lodge before they get down to business. He’s terrified that they’re going to get jacked.”

Amara sighed wearily. “Go easy on him, John. It’s his first rotation as Worshipful Master.”

Dorian wiggled his fingers at her and made an ominous face. “Oogly-oogly.” She didn’t laugh, and he shrugged. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I forgot this. It’ll just take a few minutes. Fifteen tops, I promise.”

“Do you want me to comm Mike and let him know what we’ll be doing?”

“That’s okay. I can get to Con Two without hitting any of the sensors if I go through the service closet. No need to bother him with this.”

They hurried back down the stairs and exited onto the second floor. Dorian led them on a roundabout path to the conference room that avoided all the security triggers. As he expected, the service closet was unlocked, though he did have to climb over a stack of round banquet tables that had been crammed inside and apparently forgotten after last year’s Christmas party. He scrambled clumsily over and across the mess, then through the recessed door that opened into the conference room proper. It took a bit longer than he expected to locate and reconfigure the local router. Apparently WM Hill had been worried enough about getting the task done in a timely fashion that Dorian hadn’t been the only tech he’d contacted, and whoever had attempted the reset earlier in the day hadn’t possessed security adequate for the task. Amara giggled through much of the next half an hour as Dorian got it straightened out.

They finally made their way back to the skyway entrance. Dorian was grumpy and starting to feel his lack of sleep. It didn’t help that the skyway door decided to be troublesome. He had to stand in front of the sensor panel for several seconds before it read his key and the lock clicked open. He jerked it open with a few carefully chosen profanities and was about to slam it closed behind them when the intercom below the sensor array buzzed.

“Hey, Mr. D! Is that you?” It was Ridley.

Dorian growled to himself and thought about ignoring the page, but waved for Amara to wait for him. He leaned back inside the building and punched the comm button. “This is Dorian.”

“Ah, crap, I thought you were gone!” Even through the comm crackle, Ridley sounded distraught. “Look, you got a call through the main switchboard about twenty-five minutes ago, but my panel showed that you’d just set your office locks, so I told him that you’d gone home for the night. The guy sounded like it was important, but I wasn’t going to buzz you at home, you know? I’m really sorry if I screwed up.”

“I don’t know who would be calling at this hour, Ridley,” Dorian said. Unless it was Worshipful Master Hill making sure that Dorian hadn’t forgotten about him. He was too tired to give it any more thought. “I’m sure they’ll call back if it turns out to be important. If they do, just route it to my mailbox, okay? I’ll get to it first thing in the morning.”

“Sure thing, Mr. D. Have a good evening.”

Dorian signed off and let the door close behind him.

“Do you want to see what that was about?” Amara asked him.

“No.” He may not have been more certain about anything in his entire life. “Definitely not.”

The night had grown cold, and he urged Amara forward, anticipating the Roland’s industrial grade heating system. Assuming, of course, that it hadn’t managed to get itself stolen in the long hours it had sat unattended since he and Amara had arrived at work the previous morning.

But it was right where Dorian had left it, parked on one of the lower levels under a light that had blown out a few weeks ago and not yet been replaced. It loomed up out of the darkness only when they were practically on top of it.

“You need to find a safer parking space,” Amara called to him from the passenger side as she waited for him to unlock the doors.

Dorian shook his head. “This is what we call urban camouflage. If the thugs don’t see it, maybe they won’t steal it.”

“Sure, until somebody replaces the lights.”

Dorian transmitted a code to the lock and then hauled the heavy door on his side open. “Then I’ll just have to break it again.”

He climbed inside, leaned across the front seat and flipped the security switch on Amara’s door. He gave it a hearty shove, and she slipped in beside him. She slammed it closed behind her and the whole frame rattled like the roll of a cannonade. The fuel lines had partially gelled during the chilly day, and the starter groaned crankily for several seconds before the rumbling Rigman diesel finally caught. Dorian revved the engine, spewing a dark cloud of foul smelling smoke from the tailpipe. Amara put her hand over her nose. The Roland lurched and rattled and barked into gear, sounding more like a machine of war than a civilian vehicle. He backed them out of their parking space and accelerated down the ramp toward the exit.

“Are you sure this thing gets stolen, or do you just hide it from yourself hoping that you’ll forget where you left it?” Amara asked as they pulled out onto the street. “Or maybe the government just confiscates it for your own protection.”

Dorian goosed the transmission into a higher gear, and the engine whined. He patted the dash. “Don’t listen to her, baby. She just doesn’t know a fine piece of transportation machinery when she sees it.” To Amara he said: “When I pull out the solars, she purrs along like a hover transport. The suspension is so smooth, you’d think you were riding on a flying carpet. I’ll take you into Southrange sometime, over the mountains, and you’ll see. You’ll never want to cram into public air again.”

“All the people trying to sleep along here would probably appreciate it if you engaged the solars now.”

He grimaced. The storage cells had quit on him almost six months ago. “How can you not appreciate the throaty growl of a full bore Rigman diesel?”

“It’s not the growl that bothers me so much as it’s the fear that that the poor thing is going to rattle itself to pieces.”

“Bah!” He stroked the dashboard a few more times for good measure. Or maybe for luck. Either way, he began to understand what his mother had meant all those times she’d told him how fortunate he was that he’d never had any sisters.

The streets were quiet as they rolled into the business district downtown, the lull between late night revelers and early bird entrepreneurs. Dorian kept a keen eye out for traffic patrols and violation sensors, but saw neither and so didn’t bother with most of the traffic signals. As they neared the high dome of the Landgrant Office, Amara gave him directions. Right onto Morgan, then a few blocks down, south on Braston Rightway. He couldn’t help but notice her subdued tone.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She darted her gaze out the window. “I’m okay, really. Just a little shaken, I think. It’s been an. . .interesting evening.”

Dorian eased the Roland’s speed and executed a deft U-turn in the middle of the street.

Amara looked back over her shoulder. “John, my apartment is–”

“I know, I know. I made a command decision. I think it would be better if you spent the night at my place again tonight. On account of the special circumstances, you understand.”

She covered her mouth with the back of her hand, but said nothing. He was fairly certain she was smiling, though.

“I’m still a curmudgeon,” he grumbled, apropos of nothing. “I want us to be clear on that. This has nothing to do with me going soft, getting emotional or feeling unwarrantedly fond of you, and if you had any sense of decency at all, you would sit there quietly as I drive and occupy yourself contemplating how many times I told you so. Are we clear?”

“Oh, certainly.”

They idled through the city in the early morning, running over increasingly dilapidated streets until the pavement gave out all together and the Roland bounced over rutted dirt roads on its approach to Quiksand. He opened the gates with his security pin, cruised quietly up the drive and down the short ramp to the underground garage. He found a parking space on the first level near the lift and killed the engine, then sat in the shadows for a moment, listening to the motor tick as it cooled.

What was he doing, exactly? Was this guilt? Was he somehow trying to make up for what he had done to Amara by invading her space? He didn’t understand this impulse, this sudden need to caretake her. He had told her so. Several times, in fact, and she was lucky to have emerged as unscathed as she had from the assimilation of a viral application.

Maybe he was going all squishy after all.

“Make sure you lock up,” he said, probably more harshly than was warranted, and kicked his own door open.

They rode the lift to the lobby. Dorian tried to make a point of checking in with Cuervo, the night watchman cum maintenance drone, when he came in a odd hours. Usually, he brought him coffee, chatted him up. Greasing the wheels of the maintenance queue, he called it. But when he poked his head out of the lift doors, there was no one at the desk.

Cuervo must be out on a walkabout or taking a piss, doing night watchman sorts of things.

Dorian shrugged and poked the button for his floor. It was just as well. He was too tired to explain what he was doing sharing the lift with a strange woman in the middle of the night, which tended to be the sort of thing that Cuervo was most curious about. He wasn’t sure he could adequately explain it to himself.

They rode up in silence, pinging past the floors and watching the numbers click past. Amara leaned against his shoulder, and he let her, taking strange pleasure in the warmth and solidity of her touch.

He must be really, really tired.

At last, the doors parted, the bell dinged, and the long corridor to Dorian’s coffin stretched out before them. The lights were dimmed, the filaments run down to orange embers to conserve energy. Dorian stepped out onto the landing. Amara followed quickly at his heels, probably as anxious to fall into bed as he was.

Meow.

She perked up at once. “Is that your cat?”

He didn’t know of any other cats on his floor, but he shook his head. “Can’t be. We locked him inside this morning, remember? Besides, he’s a big pussy. It scares him to death to be outside the coffin.”

Amara slipped free from his hand and tiptoed stealthily about the landing. The low, vaguely pathetic mewling continued, and she zeroed in on a stand of potted plants tucked behind a sofa in the corner next to the stairwell entrance. She lunged into the greenery and retrieved a tiger striped bundle of hissing, growling fur.

“It is your cat!” she cried, exuberantly tucking the animal into the crook of her elbow and stroking its belly. “Pretty kitty. Aren’t you a bad boy, pretty kitty.”

The cat purred.

“He must have gotten out,” she said. “The poor thing is shivering. He’s terrified. Poor, poor kitty.”

“We locked him inside.”

“Do you have someone who checks on him when you work late?”

“Actually, that’s an idea I should probably look into, but no.”

“Maybe maintenance–”

Dorian shook his head. “They would have called me if something was wrong. It’s in the Hab Covenant. They can’t enter a coffin without permission unless it’s an emergency. . .and if there had been an emergency, then they would have called.”

The cat hated being outside the apartment. Hated it. Unless Dorian had strangers over, which was why he’d been so careful about making sure the cat was locked up that morning, because it was going to be in a snit all day from Amara’s scent on the bedclothes. But here was the cat outside, nevertheless.

That feeling. He knew that feeling scratching at the back of his brain.

“I bet he’s starving,” Amara said. She leaned down and nuzzled the cat nose to nose “You are starving, aren’t you? Poor little baby.”

And where had Cuervo been? Didn’t he usually put up a sign when he went to take a piss? Back in TEN minutes. Of course, maybe he didn’t always use the sign. Maybe when he had to piss really bad, or maybe when his bowels decided to erupt, he didn’t take the time to throw out the sign. Or maybe he just forgot this once.

That was much more likely than any alternative, wasn’t it?

Much more likely than this howling, grinding imminent detonation of fear in his skull.

What would you do in his position? Raville had asked. If someone had just uncovered your plot to wage a covert war against an alien species, how angry would you be?

But Giari Tau and Michael Raville were millions of kilometers away, and even if Dorian had failed to cover his intrusion adequately, it was impossible that Raville could coordinate a retributive response so quickly, wasn’t it? He and Amara had barely had time to drive halfway across town. Impossible.

Dorian backed toward the lift doors, watching, but there was nothing to see except shadows. Nothing to hear but the early morning hum of the building’s air circulation system. Beads of sweat formed on his lip.

He punched the button to call the lift and shifted his eyes to Amara, who had moved over to the sofa and taken a seat, stroking the cat in her lap.

“We need to get out of here,” he said.

Amara lifted her chin at the hard cadence in his voice. “What’s wrong?”

“Something.”

Behind him, the lift doors pinged and sighed open, and suddenly he didn’t have any desire to cram himself back into such a restrictive space, a box with only one exit. He dashed across the landing and banged open the door to the stairwell. It was clear. No sound but the rolling echo from the door impacting the wall.

“Come on.”

Amara made no objection. She rose slowly, her body language uncertain, and let the cat spring from her arms. It dodged through the open door and vanished down the stairs without looking back.

That was all the proof Dorian needed. He followed his cat, quickly and quietly.

“What’s going on?” Amara hissed at him, her voice carrying like a shout. Dorian shook his head, said nothing, and she didn’t ask again.

They sped down four flights, then stopped. He edged up against the door and peered through the narrow pane of glass onto another landing exactly like the one on his floor and just as apparently empty. Tugging at Amara’s hand, he drew her inside. But not to the lift. Dorian banked into the corridor, broke into a sprint and hauled her all the way to the end of the hall to the service elevator at the end. It was dank, grimed with oil and dirt and had only one working overhead light. Only when the doors had closed and the car had begun to descend did he allow himself to slump, panting, against the back wall.

“It wasn’t someone you know who let the cat out, was it?” Amara whispered. In the dim light, her eyes were as large as moons.

“No.”

The elevator jerked as it reached the lobby. Dorian leapt forward and held his finger on the express button to keep the doors from opening. The car lurched, rocked on its cable and proceeded down. He watched the display. Sublevel One. Sublevel Two. Parking.

Dorian flipped the emergency stop switch and waited, listening. He heard nothing over the clank and clatter of the elevator’s normal settling noises. Carefully, he unfastened the ceiling grate and unscrewed the lone remaining light bulb. Darkness closed in on them.

“When I open the doors, stay low,” he said. “Move fast. Keep your head down, and keep away from the wall as much as possible. The Roland is at the top of the grade. You’ll be able to see it in the lights from the elevator landing. If you reach it before I do, wait for me on the driver’s side, okay?”

“Okay.”

“If they start shooting, run faster. Your body will try to freeze, but you can’t let it. Tell yourself that you’re going to run. Repeat it until you believe it.”

Indignation. “I’ve been shot at before, John. I know what to do.”

“Oh, right.”

“I can defend myself if I need to.”

“Let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that. Fast and low, okay? We’ll sort out what comes next later. Ready?”

“Yes.”

Dorian toggled the switch. The doors heaved open on ancient hydraulics, squealing loudly enough to wake light sleepers in Southrange, it seemed. He plunged forward from darkness to shadows, pounding up the ramp. He tried to keep Amara behind him, where he could keep her safe if they encountered any trouble, but she was too quick and swiftly outpaced him. She ran almost without a sound, low and fast and graceful, as fluid and alert as a predator, while he lumbered after her, his boots slapping against the pavement with gunshot cracks.

They saw no one, and he heaved a sigh of relief as reached the Roland, where Amara waited, hunkered down below the truck’s profile. He keyed the locks and they piled inside. Dorian cranked the engine and ground the transmission into reverse, then slammed into first gear and accelerated for the exit.

When they were clear of the building, Amara finally leaned back in her seat and exhaled heavily. She trembled with pent up tension. “I didn’t see anything.”

“I didn’t either.”

“That’s good, right? Maybe it was. . .”

“Just paranoia?” Dorian finished for her.

“It was just your cat,” she replied, sounding apologetic. “And we’ve had more than our share of stress today. I mean, Raville didn’t exactly help our state of mind, you know?”

“It wasn’t just the cat.” Cuervo hadn’t been at his station, either. Cuervo! Why hadn’t he thought of that right off rather than dashing off into the night like a headless chicken? “Hold on. I’ll ping the front desk through the Hab switchboard. He can check the service logs to see if there’s been any access to my coffin, authorized or otherwise, since we left this morning.”

Beginning to feel more than little foolish, Dorian bounced through his connection protocols and performed a remote log patch through his coffin’s network router.

/&OpenSess

<Ping>

<Ping>

<Ping>

<No Response: Auto-disconnex>

<[C3NP error: 7576. Log generated.]>

/&EndSess

He flipped out of geek in time to negotiate the wide bend leading to the front gates. No answer. He chuckled self-consciously. “Switchboard’s down. That’s probably what Cuervo was working on when we–”

The night erupted in a brilliant ball of orange flame. A burst of thunder rolled toward them, and a gust of concussive force nearly shoved the Roland off the road. Amara cried out and turned her head away reflexively. Dorian slammed on the brakes and they scudded to an abrupt halt.

“What–?”

He looked out his window, his throat suddenly dry. Large tongues of flame swept along the face of the West Quiksand tower, up near the top, some of them ten or fifteen meters tall. Black, oily smoke plumed into the sky, obscuring the stars. Very near to his own floor. Too near, in fact, to be any sort of accident.

A second eruption blossomed like a flower of fire. Amara screamed again and clutched at his arm, but Dorian hardly heard her. The roar of the detonation howled in his ears. The Roland’s windscreen shivered with the second blast, but held. Dorian felt the force of the explosion like a massive hand pressed against his chest, squeezing the air out of his lungs. Bits of flaming debris began to rain down on the hood and roof, on the lane about them.

What was left of the top several floors of Dorian’s building spat blinding gouts of flame into the night.

Without a word, Dorian cranked the steering wheel and mashed the gas pedal. The Roland’s all-terrain tires screeched and the back end fishtailed. He corrected automatically and kept his foot pressed all the way to the floor.

He didn’t stop for the gate.

Only when they were speeding off in the opposite direction, did he yell at Amara to get her head down, but there was no way she could have heard him. He couldn’t even hear himself. The Roland shuddered as it picked up speed heading east, down the gravel lane, then onto solid pavement again, always accelerating.

He didn’t look back.

Dorian didn’t know where he was going. Just east, then north to the expressway. Just away.

Far away from the scene where the most powerful man in human space had just tried to murder them.

<– Chapter 7 / Chapter 9 –>

<– Chapter 8 / Chapter 10 –>

Dorian rolled the trench jeep through the quiet scrub community of Gardenhole, a few kilometers north of Sonali. Dawn had come as a bleak and purple bruise on the sky. The mountains rose up grim and hostile in the west. Farther north, there were brown foothills, ridge upon ridge of naked stone and trackless wilderness. Dorian was happy to get off the main roads. They had left behind the steady streams of emergency vehicles plunging toward the disaster at Quiksand from outlying relief stations some minutes back, but morning commuter traffic had almost immediately begun to clog the expressway in their absence. It had become increasingly difficult for him to track the vehicles behind him in his rear view mirrors to determine if they were being followed.

Along the way, in more densely populated neighborhoods, men and women had stood on their front lawns, still in their night gowns and robes, peering south and west into the morning gloom, looking more than a bit bewildered by the excitement. Most of them had no doubt been plucked from sound sleep by newsflashes pinging across their local Strand hubs and data cache networks. They clustered in nervous groups, tongues wagging like clucking hens, drinking in the scene from both their remote personal perspectives and more intimately informed on-the-spot livecasts, and comparing the two. The Quiksand tragedy was a hot and happening media commodity, bleeding and leading, local history in the making. No one could resist rubbernecking a tragedy in progress, especially when the misfortune wasn’t their own.

Dorian went in the opposite direction, away from all the excitement. He had no urge to look back over his shoulder at the destruction behind them.

He said nothing during the drive, except that Amara should stay off the Strand. “Not the news, not damage reports. Don’t even check your messages. Keep it off.”

If there had been a reasonable way of doing so, he would have shut their arrays down completely, just to be safe. It was the best way he knew to confound passive ip tracking as they transitioned from one connex substation to the next. But it was probably already too late for that anyway. If Raville had been able to tag them and track them down to Quiksand that quickly he had better means than clumsy connex transfer log sniffing for getting at them whenever and wherever he chose.

Dorian didn’t explain these things to Amara. There was no help for them short of surgically removing their arrays, and anything he said would just alarm her further.

Amara looked at him as though he had gone mad, but she didn’t argue. She sat beside him with her palms pressed together between her legs, and stared out blandly through the windscreen. She appeared to him as dazed as the morning gawkers piling out onto their porches and lawns. Just as lost, just as lacking a frame of reference to make sense of it all.

But Gardenhole was still asleep in the early morning. There was no traffic here yet, no one watching the sky, or even peering out their windows. Dorian geared the Roland down and switched over from diesel to solar. The collector gauges blinked red, then orange, then pale yellow. There was hardly enough light to run on, and he had to hold the pedal almost to the floor just to tip ten kph. But they ran nearly silent, idling through the quiet community streets and, he hoped, attracted no attention.

He turned off onto a side road tucked between two stands of sprawling everanya willows and crept down a narrow lane bored through a tunnel of overarching trees. The tires crunched over fallen twigs and crisp leaves. The houses here were larger than those in the city, and set back a fair distance from the road. The yards were big, suburban and well kept, if still winter brown, and neatly trimmed hedges separated them one from another. Beneath the shade of the willows, the solars were quickly depleted, and one by one, the running lights and gauges began to fail. The Roland coasted a few hundred meters, and Dorian was just able to get it pointed down a secluded drive that appeared on the right before the engine quit completely. They rolled down a slight grade all the way to the bottom and stopped in front of a cinderblock garage when Dorian tapped on the brakes. He shut the few remaining systems down, sat back in his seat, and blew out a weary sigh. He was surprised to find that he was trembling. He curled his fingers into fists to make it stop.

After a few moments, he opened the console beside his seat and retrieved a much battered and ungainly black case.

“Come on,” he said, and climbed out.

“Where are we?” Amara asked as she joined him. Her voice quavered slightly, but she was getting a handle on it, Dorian thought. If his hands had not been full, he would have given her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “What happened back there, John? What does it mean?”

He didn’t have any answers that would comfort her, so he said: “I have friends here.” It would have been better if he smiled at her, but he didn’t have it in him.

“Your coffin. . .”

“We can chill here for a few hours; figure out what’s going on.”

“I want to go home.”

Dorian licked his lips.

“That’s probably not a good idea though, is it?” she asked.

He shook his head. With any luck, they were just trying to kill him. Because he’d failed. But it wasn’t a hope he could afford to give her, however bleak.

He hauled his luggage up the damp stone steps to the back porch. Amara followed tentatively. The lawn was still in shadow, but he could see that it was carefully tended. The grass was short, dark green instead of brown. Slender and graceful smoke trees poked out of the turf here and there on the long, rambling slope down to the dark and brooding copse of tangled undergrowth a hundred meters or more beyond the house. A nearly depleted wall of quartered cordwood stood between two of the trees, only partly shielded from the elements by a tarp that had broken its tethers and flapped morosely in the cool morning breeze. The house itself was a nondescript bi-level construction with a peaked, gray roof and a recently painted clapboard exterior. Most of the lower level was below ground, buried in the slope of the hill they had just come down, except at the far end that faced the garage. The windows were dark, and he couldn’t hear anyone moving about inside or the muffled chatter of the morning newswire. He wondered if anyone was awake yet.

Dorian set his travel case down gently on the decking and rapped his knuckles against the back door. He waited ten seconds or so, then started up again. Shortly, the slap of bare feet padding on wood floors reached his ears, and he stepped back. The rose colored curtain in the narrow window beside the door shifted. A face peered out at them, dark eyes squinting into the morning gloom. Then the scrabbling of locks. Many locks. A thrown deadbolt or two.

A massive black man stood in the doorway with his legs apart and his fists planted on his hips. He was unshaven, unamused and clearly unhappy to see them. He wore a white terrycloth house robe that was several sizes too small, covered him barely, and revealed a powerfully chiseled upper body.

He scowled at Dorian. “The newswire said you were dead.”

“I imagine it did.”

“You look all right to me,” the man said, raising his eyebrows.

“I know. I should have messaged your public box.” Dorian shrugged. “I couldn’t spare the time. And I didn’t want to use my array.”

“Didn’t want to?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Lily’s been trying not to cry for half an hour. How successful do you think she’s been?”

Dorian winced. “I’ll make it up to her.”

“You’d better think about how you’re going to make it up to me. You know how she gets.”

“I’m sorry.”

The man grunted and shifted to look Amara over. “And who are you?”

“Amara Cain,” Dorian answered. “I was getting to that. She’s a friend.”

“You’re just a little slow on all fronts this morning, aren’t you?” He extended his enormous hand toward Amara and clasped her fingers. “I’m Danek. Tyrus Danek. You’ll meet Lily in a bit. She’s my wife.”

Danek tilted his head back, indicating the interior of the house. “Come on inside.” To Dorian: “You had better have a good explanation, because otherwise you can be sure that just before Lily brains me for having been put through all of this, I’m going to strangle the life out of you. Capisce?”

Dorian only nodded and waved Amara ahead of him into the house.

They followed Danek down a short corridor to a narrow and windowless room. In the center was a hole a couple of meters on each side cut to accommodate the staircase that marched down into the basement of the long house. The upper floor was chilly. Dorian could almost see his breath. He looked around at the pictures on the walls. Most of them were characterless video captures. Landscapes fading from mountains to meadows on timed loops. The obligatory husband and wife holding hands, looking happy, but it was an old one, the pixels beginning to decay at the edges. It was a sterile space, an old woman’s parlor, kept painfully neat for family or friends who never arrived.

At the foot of the stairs, Danek tugged on a rope that dropped through a hole in the ceiling, and a malleable plastic covering dropped over the staircase. Dorian glanced up at it and saw that the underside was lined with sound suppressing foam. “Lily doesn’t like the noise so much these days,” Danek said. “It’s the hum, she says. It never stops.”

Lily likes it this way. Rustic, she says, like that cabin her folks had up on Morningway Pass.”

Dorian looked about them slowly. They had entered a long chamber. The walls were paneled with rough hewn planks. The floor was bare concrete, broken up by round, utilitarian rugs. The decorations were sparse, mostly framed photographs and flowers. The air was pungent with the scent of oil and tallow and ash. There was a stone fireplace at the far end of the room, and a sturdy if not elegant dining room table set in the middle. A couple of rocking chairs and a decent antique book cabinet completed the furnishings. Beside the fireplace was a door, but it was closed. On the other side of the stair was a concrete wall with another door. The wall was coated with more suppressant foam. There were no windows down here, and the only light came from a pair of oil lamps set in sconces on either side of the room and the meager glow of the logs in the fireplace, not yet stoked for the day.

The crowds bother her, and she can’t abide anything but walking. But that makes her joints ache for the whole next day if she goes too far.” He tugged at the sash of his robe and lowered his voice. “You’ll see for yourself in a bit. She’s in the bedroom now, making herself presentable, I imagine. She gets along a’right most days. Wishes she had more company than she gets. She’s read all the books we’ve got a dozen times. I pick up more when I can, but they’re getting harder to find in Sonali, and she doesn’t like me going all the way to Southrange.”

“Oh yes, she’s a walking disaster. Crazy as a loon, you know. But her ears still work just fine, Tyrus Danek.”

Amara inhaled sharply, but said nothing, which Dorian took as a blessing.

The creature that emerged from the bedroom was almost indescribably hideous, an unbearable monstrosity. The skull was too long, torturously malformed, bulbous where it should have been sleek and sharp where it should have been supple. It possessed neither nose nor ears, nor did it have eyelids, though its massive, crescent shaped orbital bones provided some protection, and the cold, black nanomesh screens that covered the gaping holes where eyes should have been served well enough. Her limbs were thin, like knitting needles joined at the points by a knot of yarn, but the torso was misshapen. Long at the top, like a candle that had been heated and stretched; full and round at the bottom like the belly of a winter pear, and everywhere the skin was mottled and sickly pale. She did not walk so much as she scuttled across the floor, pulling herself forward with her palms and clicking her clawed feet in rapid, mincing steps behind as she dragged the lower half of her body after her along the bare floor. The sharp knobs of her elbows and knees were level with her forehead, like those of a water spider.

Dorian set the case he had been carrying on the floor and went to her. He bent and kissed her upturned cheek. She ruffled his hair with the claw of a shorter, third arm on her right side.

“How are you, Lily?”

She waggled the third arm at him dismissively. “Don’t you try to suck up to me now, John Dorian. ” Her voice was thick, a wheeze bubbling through mucous. “First thing we hear from you in almost five weeks is that you’re presumed dead, and you believe you can just show up here and play kissy face with dear old Lily and make it all better? Shame on you, Johnny.”

Dorian hung his head. “I know, Lil. Work has been murder lately.”

She smiled at him, a black and toothless maw. “Most folks, when they say that, don’t mean it quite so literally. What sort of trouble have you gotten yourself into this time?”

He glanced uneasily at Amara, who had remained at the foot of the stairs. But she seemed to be looking right through them, hugging her elbows. “I’m not completely sure, to be honest,” Dorian whispered. “It’s a long story.”

“Your friend doesn’t seem to be doing very well.”

“With good reason, as you can imagine.”

Lily lifted her head. “Go and get some coffee started, Tyrus. These two look like they’re about ready to fall over on their feet, and I’m the only one who gets to do that in this house. ” She drew herself over toward the fire, and Dorian started to follow her, then went back and took Amara by the arm and led her after him. Danek vanished through the door in the soundproofed wall on the other side of the room and closed it quietly behind him. “We might as well get comfortable in the meantime. Now, John, you remember to be a nice young man and let your friend have that chair. Haul that one by the book shelf over here if you want to sit down.”

She tucked her limbs into a neat pile on a mat beside the fireplace and used one of her claws to stir the logs. The fire popped and crackled as she coaxed it to life. She turned her glistening eyes on Amara and offered a close-mouthed smile.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Cain. Tyrus did a passable enough job with the introductions that I imagine you’ve guessed who I am.”

Amara stumbled a bit, but managed a hollow, unfocused greeting. Dorian leaned over to her. “Don’t mind Lily. She’s just showing off. She has the ears of a bat. ” He thought for a moment, then added, “Not literally, of course. The principle is the same, though.”

“Hyper-cochlear auralectics,” Lily said. “Very beta. Not anything like the finely tuned augmentations you’d be familiar with, dear.”

“I see,” Amara answered.

“It’s all right. I know it’s disturbing. You’ll notice that we’re not big on mirrors down here. Johnny pretends, but I can hear his eyes clicking away from me, even when he thinks he’s looking.”

Amara didn’t respond. She stared into the fireplace, the leaping flames, momentarily lost. Dorian caught Lily’s gaze and shrugged an apology. He mouthed the word shock, and Lily nodded in understanding.

Danek returned from the kitchen, bearing a plastic platter laden with mugs of steaming coffee. Dorian nodded his thanks and to show his gratitude, gave up his chair for a seat on the stone ledge beside the fire, across from Lily.

“They’re reporting across the local newswire that the fires are under control finally. Investigators are gathering on scene, but they don’t know much yet. Most of the West Tower is gone above your floor, John, but they won’t have an accurate casualty count until the investigators can start picking through the wreck. No official word on the cause, but they’re guessing that it was a gas leak.”

“There was no gas leak, but that probably won’t stop them from finding one,” Dorian predicted. “That’s generally the way these things work.”

“You care to explain which of these things you mean?” Danek asked, managing to sound both curious and annoyed at the same time.

Amara looked up sharply. “You said the newswire is reporting that John is presumed dead. Did they say anything about me?”

Danek tilted his head toward her, clearly confused. “Not that I’ve heard. Are you two neighbors?”

“I ought to message my mother to let her know I’m okay,” she said vaguely. “She’ll be frantic if the newswire–”

“Stay off the Strand!” Dorian barked and flashed her a warning look. “I mean it. The connection isn’t safe right now. They can read your ip when you log onto a public hub.”

“Which they would that be, John?” she asked. There was an edge of frustration, of imminent hysteria about her. It was the most spark he’d seen out of her since they had run from Sonali. “What’s going on here?”

“They would be whoever it was that Raville dispatched to kill us. Most likely military specialists, but I’m not ruling out freelance corporate stringers. Some of those guys aren’t afraid to get a little dirty if the price is right, and they’re easy to find if you’ve got contacts. I’m sure Raville has resources of both sorts at his disposal. ” Amara started to respond, but Dorian shook his head. “Right now, they think we’re dead. It’s best to leave it that way until we can figure out what we’re going to do.”

“But, why?” she demanded. “Why would he try to kill us? We’re trying to help him.”

“Not that one,” Dorian said, keeping his tone gentle. “He assumed the actual Raville would try something, but neither of us expected it to be this soon.”

Amara shuddered and clutched her arms over her chest once again. “But why? What have we ever done to him?”

He had to remind himself that there was much she did not know, too much that Raville had told him only after she had been expelled from his presence. Amara knew only that she had pledged to help him save the universe in the dream of Raville’s memory palace, then awakened to find her life in danger almost immediately and without explanation. She didn’t know what Raville had done to her, or the truth about the quae-ha-distra code object, only that the world had erupted into madness.

It was no wonder that she was holding on by her fingernails and failing to make sense of just about everything. For about the hundredth time in the last few hours, Dorian cursed Raville under his breath.

“It’s complicated,” he said simply. “Suffice it to say that Raville wasn’t quite as forthcoming with you as he should have been, and the real person has a legitimate cause to feel somewhat aggrieved.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” Danek grumbled. “You want to explain what’s going on in a way that we can understand, or are we just here to provide moral support for your genius?”

Lily hummed softly to herself. “You mentioned Raville. That isn’t Michael Raville by any chance, is it?”

“That would be the one.”

“Oh, Johnny! How did you manage to get yourself mixed up with big time trouble like that?”

Dorian hesitated, feeling uneasy about such a direct question. “As much as I’d like to satisfy your idle curiosity, Lil, I think that’s really about as much as you need to know. I didn’t come here to get you involved in my problems. I needed an anonymous hardline ex-connex, and I needed an alternate form of transportation since my Roland is too distinctive as well as registered in my name. You’re the only people I know who have both of those things and don’t use either of them. ” Lily and Danek had given up their arrays almost ten years earlier. “Other than that, I want the two of you to stay as far away from this one as possible.”

Lily fixed Dorian with her blind gaze. “What is it that you’re intending to do, exactly?”

“I intend to use your ex-connex. Then I intend to borrow your car. What part of that plan was I unclear about?”

“We can’t help if you don’t let us in, Johnny.”

“And I can’t justify putting you in more danger than I may already have. If I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t have come here at all.”

Danek laughed loudly. “Now there’s a first. Boy, I’ve been wet nursing your troubles since your first day of TechTac. You’d better listen close to what the lady has to say, because she’s asking nice. I’m not nearly so sweet, nor so patient. You’re going to explain it to us, and you might as well give it up easy, because I know you don’t want me to go get my Gunny boots on and make you report it formally like we used to do after one of your screw ups. Don’t think I’ve forgotten how.”

Dorian grimaced. “Danek, I really don’t think–.”

“What’s that?” Danek cupped a hand behind ear and leaned forward menacingly. “What’s that you say, Corporal?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“That’s better.” He sat back with a contented grin. “Go ahead, then. From the top.”

So Dorian told them, starting with his discovery of the spider, his careful dissection of its contents and the dead port on his network, then on to the memory palace, the meeting with Raville’s self-aware copy, and finally the transfer of the orb from Raville to Amara. What came after he hadn’t even shared with Amara yet, so he tried to be as thorough as possible, though he glossed over his subsequent actions in the basement of the Archive and his defensive maneuvers inside Raville’s foam as much as possible, trusting Danek and Lily to fill in the blanks.”

“I don’t like this man Raville very much,” Lily said when he was done. “Either the copy or the original. He tastes foul to me. Like any man who has picked himself an agenda and gotten so used to commanding others, that he’s forgotten about the consequences. We’ve known our share of men like that.”

Danek nodded vaguely, but scowled at Dorian. “You should have known better than to go into a hostile scape in the first place without an adequate extraction vector or the tools to get the job done correctly.”

“I had an escape plan,” Dorian countered.

“Any escape that doesn’t have the flexibility to respond to unforeseen circumstances and account for the safety of your entire team is flawed. You know that. I taught you better than that.”

“This isn’t his fault. I asked to go with him,” Amara said. “He warned me of the dangers.”

“He did no such thing. He didn’t properly analyze the risks before he barged in there like every other dumb old Marine bent on kicking butts and breaking things down. That’s always been your problem, John. Because it’s just text, isn’t that right?” Danek glared at Dorian, his eyes narrowed with disappointment. “It isn’t real. It can’t hurt anybody, especially not somebody fast enough or clever enough to outsmart a bunch of stupid text scripts.” He shook his head fiercely. “You were never able to stop thinking like a jack, like someone above the environment, or immune to it. Someone who could always control it on the fly. You’ve always been just a little too competent for your own good.”

Lily raised herself up from her mat menacingly. She made a sound in her throat like hissing. “Hush now, Tyrus. That’s enough. We’ve been over that ground before, and there’s no coal left to mine there. Let it be.”

Danek stared, sullen and silent, into his coffee. He didn’t challenge Lily’s outburst, but he wasn’t ready to let it go so easily, either. He didn’t speak again. Lily watched him for a few moments, her expression tender, then gradually relaxed her limbs and settled back onto her mat. “You did an adequate job of managing the variables you could reasonably be expected to account for, Johnny. You had your target identified and contained. You had a fair notion of his capabilities given his past actions and his environmental limitations. I doubt that any of us could have predicted this business with the orb. That was dirty. It was a ploy designed to give you just the one option.

“And to be honest, I think your package of Raville knew exactly what he was doing, and had a decent idea about what would happen next. He may not be the known Raville, but he is a raw Raville, and the willingness to put others in danger, the willingness to kill a man who is a complete stranger simply because he might one day prove a threat to you isn’t something that most people grow into. It’s either there from the start, or it isn’t, barring genetic tampering. I’d be very careful with a man like that, and extremely wary of trusting anything he said to me.”

Her expression softened, her mouth twisted into a sort of frown that Dorian might not have understood if he didn’t know her so well. She was preparing herself to say something hard, something she didn’t think he would want to hear. “But he’s like you too, Johnny. Tyrus was right with what he said. You live in the text, in worlds you think you can manipulate. We taught you to do that, but you were always that much better than the people giving you instruction because you understood, on some level, the real power that was being put into your hands. Everyone else in this pathetic old world of ours is immersed in the things you and those like you create. It’s their bread, their wine, their stimulation and their participation in the community of humankind. Every time you make something or destroy it, you change the lives of a billion unseen people. You alter the trajectory of their lives because they have to go somewhere else to get what they need. You lay out the paths that they can follow. You draw the maps through the wilderness, and because of the decisions you make, they end up bouncing off of people and ideas and institutions they would have otherwise never met, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. You change what they have the potential to become. But you, you live outside that messy web of interconnection. You use it instead of taking it into yourself. You make it into something that pleases you.

“I think this copy of Raville recognized as much. Recognized you, or something in you, that suits his purposes. You suspected, probably correctly, that he’s seen your employment file. And indeed, much more than that, truth be told. He’s been looking over your shoulder for some time, knows about all your little tricks with the folks at Hometown Mart or Sierra Bancorp or any of your other favorite targets, all the things you think are secrets. See, the problem is that you’ve finally met your match. He’s got you on the other side of the text now, messing with your life at a whim, altering your landscape to meet his taste. You treat the Strand and the foam like your private little kingdom. Well, the foam is his kingdom. It’s what he is. He manipulates his environment just by thinking about it, and any man, real or virtual, who gets used to thinking like that is dangerous to the people around him. A man like that comes to see himself as a god of sorts.”

Lily gave him a long, hard look. “So you need to decide, and quick, what you’re going to do about it. You can’t walk away from this. You can’t delete it. You can’t rewrite it and make it so that it never happened. A living god has put a charge upon you, though you didn’t ask for it. That’s the way of gods. Oh, you can kill him, sure, or at least this incarnation of him, but you can’t stop what he’s put into motion. You can only walk the path he’s set before your feet or be destroyed. It’s up to you to determine which way you’re going to go from here.”

“What can I do? What choices have we really got?” Dorian demanded. “How am I supposed to trust anything he told us? Raville knew what would happen when he passed over the orb. He knew his actualized self would try to kill us, Lil.”

“And when the true Raville has figured out that he failed, he’ll try again. And he’ll keep trying until the job is done. You and Tyrus and I, we’ve all been there before, so put away your moral outrage and see the situation for what it is. How do you stop them? How do you beat them? It doesn’t particularly matter who they are. It just matters that you push them to the endgame as quick as you can, so that win or lose, you’re of no value to them anymore. You focus on staying alive long enough to get there. So I say again, what are you going to do? What tools did Raville’s package give you against himself? I’m not saying to trust him, dear. I am saying that nobody knows better how to stop a god than another god.”

“I don’t know,” Dorian said, feeling uncertain. Lily had always been good at casting situations into black and white, into straightforward choices that must be made. “I mean, he told me how to access the quae-ha-distra. But I don’t know what’s in there. That’s why I need your ex-connex. I brought along an old portable Korski pre-seenop compiler I can use to jack into my foam anonymously without using my published ip. I can’t guarantee that Raville won’t detect the intrusion, but at least he won’t be able to track what I’m doing and he can’t be positive that I’m the one doing it. Knowing what’s in there, what he wants to keep secret, that’ll give me a map of the territory, at least. That’s a start. We can decide what needs to happen next from there.”

“I know what’s in there,” Amara said suddenly, in a voice so small, Dorian almost didn’t hear her. She turned to face him and her eyes were too large, too distant, as hollow as an old, abandoned well. “I know what’s inside, through the quae-ha-distra.”

Lily gazed curiously at her, as though seeing Amara for the first time. “What’s in there, Amara? What have you seen?”

“Do you want to see?” Amara looked from side to side, furtively. “I can show you.”

“Stay off the Strand,” Dorian said once again.

But Lily held up one of her claws, urging him to be silent.

“Go ahead, Amara,” she said.

Danek grunted. “John’s right, baby. It doesn’t make any difference. Even if it was safe, neither of us has the tools to see it on the Strand. It’s a coded artifact.”

“But I can show you, if you want to see,” Amara insisted. She pressed her hand against her chest, in the same place where Raville had touched her inside the memory palace. “It isn’t hard.”

And just as before, just as it had been in geek, a black and empty slit opened in her flesh. Amara put her hand inside.

Danek made a strangled, gasping noise. Dorian leapt to his feet and cried out, throwing his tepid coffee all over the floor.

Amara brought out the quae-ha-distra, shimmering in the shadowed room, and held it out to Lily on her palm. It glowed like an iridescent heart, casting arcane patterns on the walls. Lily remained on her pallet, unmoving, but fiercely alert.

“They gave it to me,” Amara explained slowly, like a child speaking to children. Light coursed through her fingers, dripped from her hands into puddles of red and green and gold. “It’s what let me go inside, where the Helpers are. They came to me, just like he said they would.” She turned to Dorian. “Why would he try to kill us, John? After he had shared this? After he had given knowledge?”

She gazed at him, hand extended, looking lost and vacant and alone.

“That can’t be,” Danek whispered, sitting stiff and upright in his chair. He gripped the arms in his powerful hands as if he meant to crack the wood. “You said it was code.”

“It was code,” Dorian snapped.

“That doesn’t look like any code I’ve seen. Lily?”

She said nothing at first, and Danek called her name again. Deliberately, Lily roused herself and waved her arm at Dorian. “Tell her to put it away, Johnny. I don’t need to hear it any more.”

He crossed the room with careful steps, keeping in Amara’s line of sight, so as not to frighten her. When he reached her, he lowered himself to his knees until he was level with her, face to face. Trembling, he grasped her wrist and folded her outstretched fingers over the light of the orb. Her scales were cool to the touch, hard like old leather.

“It’s time to put it away, Amara.”

“You should see what’s in it.”

“I’ll see later, okay? For now, just put it back where it belongs.”

She searched his face for a moment. Dorian didn’t know what it was that she sought, but she must have found it, because after a moment, she nodded in acquiescence and tucked the quae-ha-distra away, then she put her head against the tall back of the chair and closed her eyes.

Dorian leaned over her, listening to her breathing. “I think she’s asleep.”

“I think I’m the one who is asleep,” Danek muttered. “That was impossible, yes? What in God’s name is going on?”

“I don’t know.” Dorian backed away from Amara. He couldn’t think, couldn’t begin to pull this apart and figure it out. But by the time he reached his seat alongside the fireplace, Lily was already in motion. She hauled herself up onto her hands and feet, wobbled a bit as though her balance was off, but all the time called out brisk directions to her husband.

“Make up the bed in the bedroom upstairs, Tyrus. There are spare blankets and fresh linens in the storage chest in the closet off the utility room. Give them a little heat if you can get the furnace working. Johnny, I think it’s best if the two of you stay together. She shouldn’t be alone right now. Tyrus will make you a nice mat on the floor, I’m sure. You’ve slept in worse places.” He started to speak, but Lily brushed right past him. “I don’t want to hear it, young man. I’m not ready to talk about it, and neither are you. We’d just make a mess of nonsense out of things we don’t understand. Rest for awhile. Sleep on it.”

Both Dorian and Tyrus Danek knew better than to argue when she got like this, so they didn’t.

He woke with a start to darkness. Suffocating. Weight on his chest, his limbs entangled. He raised himself up sharply and struck his head hard against something solid and collapsed again. Dorian pressed his palm against the sharp pain in his forehead and groaned.

He’d been dreaming. Dreaming of fire and pursuit, of disastrous decisions.

Of screams, high and frightened, banging down the cold metal corridors, chasing after him like accusations, boring into his flesh like greedy claws.

Dorian lay still, gathering his thoughts and remembering where he was. His body ached from a restless sleep on the hard floor and, he suspected, from carrying more tension in his muscles than he’d wanted to admit to himself. It had been a long day. A red letter day. The sort anyone with sense hoped came no more than once or twice in a lifetime. He wasn’t even sure he remembered the last time someone had tried to kill him. He was glad, on the other hand, to have apparently gotten over the little psychic kick that came along with it, the alarmingly egoistic boost that someone out here felt strongly enough about him to so ardently want him dead. Maybe there was hope for his maturity level yet. His mother had always held out hope that one day he would outgrow his ego.

In any event, with stillness came clarity. He couldn’t move because someone was on top of him. Or not on top of him exactly, but beside him, twining her limbs amongst his like she intended to conform him to her shape. He touched her limbs, the gentle swell and diamond shapes of her scales. She was strong, and she clung to him with the insistence of sleep, so he lay back and willed himself not to struggle against her grip. Amara whimpered quietly until he stopped moving, then hugged tighter to him and fell quiet again.

The room’s ambient lighting system eventually registered his change in body temperature and the overhead bulbs snapped on, a soothing, ruddy glow like candlelight. He took in his surroundings: plain, baby blue walls with a northerly facing window obscured by thick curtains. A Puritan inspired presswood bureau in the corner. Off to the left, in the opposite corner, was an open doorway to the washroom. It was quiet and sterile, the same as the rest of the house, a domain of long-wearied ghosts. He couldn’t see a clock from where he lay, and caught himself just before he consulted his system time by reflex. Directly above him he could see the natty and cobwebbed underside of a bedside table. He vaguely remembered bunking down beside the bed, but comfortably south of the table. He must have wriggled in his sleep. He was a notorious wriggler, a toss-and-turner. He probed the ache in his head and agreed that the size and shape of it more or less fit the size and shape of the imprint said table would make upon a skull if the two bodies were brought together with sufficient force. That was comforting, somehow. He wasn’t even out of bed yet and was already beginning to resolve some of the many mysteries his life had decided to pitch at him.

The minutes dragged by. His headache slowly subsided. He made motorboat noises with his lips for a time and stared at the ceiling. It had been a long while since he’d awakened before a bedmate, he realized (a rather embarrassingly, almost emasculatingly long while as he counted it up, in fact). He had forgotten the protocols for this sort of thing. So he just waited.

It occurred to him that moments, minutes like this were the reason the Strand had been invented in the first place.

After a time, he felt her move sinuously against him. Dorian looked down on her face in the gloom as she opened her eyes. She blinked at him, then covered her mouth with the hand that had lain across his chest.

“Well, this is awkward,” she said.

“I have all my clothes on. And I can’t be held responsible for the fact that you don’t wear any.”

“True.”

“I put you in the bed. I swear. Danek saw me do it.”

She might have grinned, but he couldn’t be certain. Her hand was still in the way. “I believe you. I woke up once, briefly. I was scared, and you seemed to be sleeping so soundly.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

Once again, she searched his face, reading things he couldn’t guess. “Is it, John?”

“This is okay, you and me. It’s the rest of our lives that are a parade of unmitigated disasters.” She nodded in understanding, and he winked at her. “How are you feeling?”

“Better.” She didn’t sound completely certain, but it was something, so Dorian didn’t press her. “I have only the vaguest memories of yesterday. Yesterday? This morning? I’ve lost track. What time is it?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Late, I’d imagine. But I can smell coffee, so Danek is still up, at least. Or back up. Whatever.”

“I don’t know what happened to me,” she said, “there at the end.”

“There’s no need to talk about it right now if you’re not up to it.”

“I feel like I have to. I want to understand what happened.”

There was an unspoken appeal in her eyes, not the near hysteria of the morning, but something deeper, a burgeoning fear of the unknown. She needed to sort through it just as desperately as he did, perhaps more than he did. She had experienced things with Raville, inside the foreign foam, that she hadn’t yet shared with him. She must have questions he hadn’t even imagined yet, because he didn’t have the proper context; mysteries she could share, but that he didn’t have the framework to comprehend.

He began slowly, gently. “How long have you known? That you were carrying the orb, I mean.”

“I can’t really say. When I try to think about it, it’s like I’ve always known. It’s just always been there…but that can’t be right, because Raville gave it to me, or he gave me the key and the Helpers gave me the orb.” Her lips curled in a weary and dazed smile. “Sorry. It’s something of a muddle still. At the same time, I can’t say that I was ever actually conscious of the orb itself until the impulse struck me to bring it out. And then it wasn’t really an impulse, it was…inevitable. It was like suddenly remembering something you’ve done, a trip that you took a long time ago or suddenly remembering a scar you’d forgotten you had. You don’t consciously think about it, but when it comes up, you have this flash of recognition that yes, I’ve been there, I’ve experienced that. It’s part of the fabric of who I am. Does that make sense?”

“No.” But it wouldn’t have, no matter how she explained it. He wasn’t the one carrying the orb inside him. “But I can live with not comprehending if I know that you’re okay.”

She pressed the side of her face against his chest, squeezing him between her powerful arms. “I’m frightened by it. I’m angry because Raville gave it to me knowing that someone would try to kill us. He didn’t warn me, and I’m scared about that, too, about the other things he might not have warned us about. What’s inside it frightens me, the potential and the risk, but it fills me with this strange sort of exhilaration at the same time. The worst of it is that all of my feelings are a little hazy, like I should be feeling one certain way about it, but when I try, it’s like I’m just pretending. I can’t seem to think or feel very clearly about any of it, not the orb or the attack or even Raville’s manipulations. I’m just here, watching it all happen, and that seems to be all I have the strength for.”

Dorian nodded, though he still didn’t understand, and rubbed her shoulder. “It’s natural to feel a little conflicted at this point, I think. There’s so much we don’t know, and so much has happened since this morning. Besides, this is much more useful than all of us getting hysterical, right?”

“Does it scare you, John?”

“Honestly? It scares the crap out of me. But I hope that when we figure out what it is and how it works, it won’t be so terrifying anymore. My hope is that Danek and Lily will have worked out some insights for us since they’ve had all day to think about it while we were sleeping. They’re good at this sort of thing, at unraveling mysteries. They can help us sort this out.”

“They’re friends of yours? Good friends, I mean. You’re sure you can trust them.”

“We have a long history.”

“You served with Danek, yes? In the Marines.”

Dorian thought about his answer for a long time, surveying all the potential pitfalls. “I served with both of them.”

“Lily?” She was surprised.

“Yes.”

Amara hummed over this information, and her body grew tense. She was working up to something. “She’s in pain, you know. Danek knows it, but tries to ignore it most of the time.”

“He doesn’t ignore it. They have treatments that keep the worst of her symptoms under control, as long as she isn’t too active or doesn’t push herself too hard. But beyond those, there’s only so much he can do for her.”

Amara pulled herself up onto her elbows. “Why does she endure it? It’s a bad mod, a horrible mod. She knows it. All you have to do is look at her to see that. I understand that it would be a long way for her to get to an upload station, but the pain would only be temporary. She could have something new built, something better, or even reconstitute–”

“She wouldn’t do it. Danek used to say the same things. They had some epic and glorious battles over it back when they were first married.” Dorian took a deep breath. It still hurt after all these years to talk about it. “But Lily, sweet Lily, she converted to hardcore New Resurrection near the end of her tour of service. She’d zapped so many times, she said, been wiped and reconfigured so often, that there wasn’t anything left of her but her soul, and she wasn’t even sure anybody but God would recognize that. Call it bad timing. Call it a deep and abiding need to make amends for the crimes she’d charged against her soul. She connected with God when she had one last task to perform in the civil service of our fair world and its inhabitants, and when Lily makes up her mind about something, there’s no arguing with her. She said she’d meet God in the condition that he found her and no other. The rest, everything that comes along with it, is just walking the talk, I guess.”

“I don’t understand,” Amara said. “She’d rather be in pain?”

“She calls it faith. It’s a long story, but I don’t really understand it either.”

Amara dropped her gaze to the floor. “Is that why Danek was so angry with you for taking me to meet Raville?”

“Why would you say that?”

“You love her. Not in the same way that Danek does, but rather like a dream, or something nostalgic. You carry it like guilt, or like an old bone you can’t help but gnaw. You and Danek both. It’s between you all the time, a subtext running beneath everything you say.”

“You’re picking at old wounds,” he said gruffly. “Danek and I both have a harder time forgiving me than Lily did. Sometimes that’s worse, I think. Being forgiven by someone who means it.”

Amara backed off, figuratively by withdrawing into herself and literally by pulling her knees up to her chest, crossing her arms in front of her and resting her chin on them. “You don’t have to tell me.”

But that wasn’t true, not at all. He owed her something, a trade in kind for the things he’d seen and done to her while she slept off Raville’s synaptic bridge. Secret for secret. Dorian cleared a sudden lump in his throat, and said, “Danek and I, we worked together. Ninth Technical Tactics Group, stationed over in Annawan at Fac Granger. They called us the Icebreakers. That’s what we did, went after hostile networks to extract military data for analysis, supported tactical units in the field with real time intelligence data, performed mobile killings of big score physical security systems. That’s also where Lily fit in. We were the support side for her SpecTac squad during the Hamers-Doss Insurrection.”

Amara rolled her head to the side and gave him an uncertain look. She had still been on Sae Phen during the HD, he realized, or young and footloose enough that the minutiae of a dirty little colonial war wouldn’t have occupied much of her attention.

“It was complicated, the HD, because the media played it as our government trying to hold onto independence-minded colonies out in the Corus mining belt. We needed their silicate, that’s true enough, but Hamers was really just a puppet for Janus Prime. They were pushing hard to expand into our proprietary space. Most of the actual flesh and blood battles were against Janite ships flying the HD flag. But since there had been no formal declarations of war on either side, this just passed under the public radar. We weren’t going to declare because it would have made us look overly aggressive to the rest of the co-op sector. It was important for us politically to describe it as an unlawful insurrection. Janus Prime wasn’t going to, either, because they already had their own public relations issues after the Great Parming War. So it made for some messy complications. We worked under significant constraints to maintain the illusion that we weren’t stomping anthills with matter cannons. That was where SpecTac was so valuable. They could work anonymously, viciously, in places where we couldn’t send regular troops.

Dorian closed his eyes, concentrated on breathing, on just getting the words out. But it wasn’t that easy. He couldn’t talk about it without seeing it. He couldn’t see it without living it all over again. “God, you should have seen her in those days. She was beautiful. Her wide, dark eyes, that smile so white and generous, it made your heart flutter. She was always laughing. It didn’t surprise any of us when Danek fell in love with her–we were all half in love with her ourselves. Because part of it was what she did, you see? She was SpecTac, quick insertion cleanups and demolition, but she wasn’t like the rest of them. She wasn’t hard, wasn’t full of darkness and hate. She hummed with love. Don’t get me wrong, she did her job as well as anybody else, but it simply didn’t touch her somehow. She was better than that, better than all of it, despite the fact that her team was always the one being given the worst assignments, the deep infiltrations. I think the brass recognized how special she was, too. Not just her competence, but her ability to handle the lousy jobs without getting messed up by them. If there was a guy, a Janite colonel or something, who was giving us problems, they’d send Lily’s team in to clean him up. You know, not just this colonel himself, but maybe his wife, too, and his kids back on Janus Prime. Send a message to the other side that we could get them anywhere and any time we wanted, and the only thing constraining us was our own sticky, silly political situation. Lily would do that, then be home a couple of weeks later, smiling and laughing, having us all over to her apartment for pizza and beer. Like nothing had ever happened.

“Near the end of the war, about the time the Janites were finally realizing that they were running out of the economic will to keep fighting a stalemate over the Corus Belt and our side could tell that the hostilities were winding down, Defense Min Chalker decided that it was time to go for the throat. He was looking for a win, you know. Not just a quelled insurrection that left the Corus operation in shambles, but an honest to God victory over Janus Prime. A crippling blow. With that, he could take all the evidence we’d gathered about Janite interference to the other heads of state in this sector and drum up some real antipathy toward them, maybe muzzle them for a couple of decades with trade sanctions or something. Who cares? What he wanted was Hamers himself, because we’d jacked some evidence from the insurrection’s infocache that Hamers was in regular, direct contact with Janus Prime. If we could capture Hamers, he’d talk. He’d testify to it in Reconciliation Court.

“We worked hard, the Icebreakers, I mean, to crack their live military comm foam–that was our overriding mission, above and beyond all the other crap we did with unit support and data acquisition. Finally jacking that was probably what put the idea into Chalker’s head in the first place. The HD wouldn’t last long if they couldn’t even talk to one another securely, so we had to move fast. We were able to determine that Hamers would be visiting a command bunker on Zarette with a small entourage on a certain date. Zarette, we suspected, was the big foam archive station for the insurrection leadership. The brass decided to send in Lily and her team to grab him, blow the archive so they couldn’t reconstitute him from a backup, and leave no doubt that we had the original.

“So we shipped out, our small technical group with Lily’s SpecTac squad on a rapid-bore cutter and set up operations inside a heavy rad nursery about a dozen tics from the Zarette asteroid. Low profile, no fire support except the fighter escorts we brought with us on the Phantasm. Lily collected the latest intel on the second morning, confirmed that the target was in place, then loaded up in a dropcoffin and was gone. I don’t think she even kissed Danek goodbye. She was like that. Didn’t mix her personal and professional lives, especially after she converted to New Res, said she didn’t want to taint the things worth living for with the things worth killing for. I wonder, sometimes, if she regrets that most of all, missing that last real kiss, or if that’s just part of her understanding of Divine Providence and making amends.”

Dorian paused for a time, caught up in remembering. The chilly, cramped corridors of the Phantasm, the foul smell of unwashed soldiers. Lily stepping down into her dropcoffin, looking up at Danek one last time, giving them all a thumb’s up signal as the techs sealed her in. They’d pulled out her array before shipping to keep the Janite scrubbers from keying into her signal emissions. It was the last they heard from her until long after she and her team had touched on Zarette’s ponderously rotating surface.

He shook his head to clear the webs out, went on. “She gave us a quick sit-rep. The coffins were intact, the splash zone was tighter than we’d predicted, so she had fallen out within ready visual of her whole team, which didn’t happen very often. She sounded pretty happy about it. It was a good omen. She declared comm silence, which was standard protocol, and reminded us of the pickup coordinates one last time. Then she bugged out.

“So we sat back and waited, busied ourselves with the usual things like monitoring hostile comm traffic, staring at surface scan delays, looking for anything that would give us an indication of how the mission was going. It was scripted to resolve in just under six asthours.

“We got the call we had all feared without saying so at the four hour mark. It came from a Janite signal-transform officer, riding our own encrypted frequency from the SpecTac team’s p2p scramblers on their portable comms. It didn’t really matter what he said at that point. If they were jacking our signal, they’d caught the insertion team. Somebody had been broken. Once he knew he had the connection, he handed off the broadcast triDvid to Hamers himself.

“‘I believe I’ve found something that belongs to you,’ he said, and he was grinning. He had hard, evil eyes, I remember that. ‘Unfortunately, it isn’t completely intact. We’ll dispose of the broken bits in our own way. Perhaps next time you’ll be more cautious with your possessions. ‘

“That was the way he was. So cool, so aware of the political angles. It was always a wink and a nod. Later we found out that it was the intelligence that had failed us. Yes, Hamers was there on Zarette, but so were a dozen other members of their advisory staff. It was a wholesale packaging in preparation for dispersal to friendly outposts around human space. They knew the insurrection was failing, that Janus Prime was backing out, and the leadership had decided to withdraw and leave surrender negotiations to the middle management. Lily’s team dropped into security that was much heavier than we’d anticipated, and they never had a chance.

“They sent us back three of the SpecTac team. Three out of twelve. I didn’t see the other two, but I heard that they were in such bad shape that the commander of the Phantasm didn’t even bother with med alert. He had them scanned and packaged and put in ice for reconstitution at home, euthed the remains. If it was anything like the condition Lily was in they were happy enough to go, I suspect.

“There are no words,” he said in a low voice, “for the things they did to her. No, for the things they were doing to her, for the pain she was in. They had put out her eyes, taken her fingers, mangled her feet. And it was still happening. They’d infected her with some sort of viral bomb that was shutting down her systems one at a time, a steady and irrevocable invasion of nanomech antigens. Obscene punitive technology that had been outlawed by the Dorn Conventions a generation ago. And Lily, she was aware of all of it, the things it was doing to her body, because it kept her awake and aware. You could hear her screaming all the way down the deck, even with the door to the med bay closed. She made us promise not to package her. She made us swear, even the ship’s commander. She said it was a matter of religious observance, and he had to comply after that. All he could do was shake his head.

“The smart thing to do would have been to put her in stasis while we burned for Maltis, but it was a week out at least, and I believed–Danek, too–that she wouldn’t survive that long. Something had be done to slow down the assemblers at least. So I told him I could do it. I wanted to do it, because I couldn’t stand seeing her in so much pain, and wanting turned into believing at some point. Danek was the only one who could give me permission. The docs had pumped Lily full of pain medication, a controlled coma, to help her weather the worst of it, but Danek and Lily had been married three weeks before we’d shipped. He had the legal right to override her objections and authorize the treatment I proposed. He had to, because what I had proposed was dangerous. Any of a hundred things could go wrong. If I botched it, it might kill her outright.

“But I believed I could do it, and I made Danek believe.” Dorian kept his eyes shut tight, focused on the words alone, spilling out his sins in the dry monotone of a penitent making confession. He was sweating. “Jacking the bomb was no problem. It was the work of a couple hours. But I spent two feverish days designing a radical seenop interface with the mech assembler. I ran thousands of simulations, isolated a hundred different antigens and learned how to take them apart and read their encoding. I just wanted to stop them, not destroy them, so I dug shallow pits over a wide area instead of excavating the engine like I should have. I knew better, of course, but I was rushing because of Lily’s pain, and because of our belief that she wouldn’t make it to Maltis. I told myself that I could deal with any surprises the engine might come up. I trusted my interface and my skills and my basic intellectual superiority over any other coder’s work.

“I went in on the third day, slipping in through an exploit I’d discovered in the Janite array. I hooked into the assembler just like I’d planned, and began the slow and tedious process of tracing instruction nodes, isolating command cores and rescripting the basic parameter sets. Med techs fed me progress reports as I went along. Her systems were stabilizing, her native defenses were starting to combat and flush the pockets of mechs that I was shutting down.

“But what I didn’t know, because I hadn’t dug deeply enough into the code engine, was that I’d missed a trigger point. Whoever had designed the viral bomb had recognized that his code was just like any other application, and that it could be breached by a jack with the right skills. So he set up a functional threshold in the assembler logic. Once it had hit certain mech production targets, it started assigning counter tags to the units with wickedly obscure recursive reporting functions. When those tags began to vanish in sufficient numbers, the array read it as an attack on its systems and activated a dormant alternate troll app. This application was a complex cortical sub-array that stimulated abnormal genetic growth, a combination code spew and biological engine. After the first ten seconds, I was completely overwhelmed. After twenty seconds, I was lost inside my own interface. At thirty, I was booted off the Strand and couldn’t jack back in with any of my standard scripts. I was helpless, a spectator. We were all just spectators.

“The only thing I accomplished was keeping Lily alive. The troll app was designed not to kill, but to maximize suffering while the assemblers finished their work. I had been more efficient at shutting the assemblers down than the app coder predicted and I left scripts behind that completed the job I couldn’t, but there was nothing I could do about the desecration of her body. I’d started it, but I couldn’t stop it.

“What you see now is the aftermath. After five days of her abject suffering, we made it to Maltis. The docs there did the best they could, but it wasn’t much. The troll app had given her a bastard aural mod so she could hear herself scream. Our specialists salvaged some of her sight with microvids etched onto the optical nerve bundle. They stabilized the joint constructs so she had some mobility. It was all done with this sort of triage mentality, you know. They had been handed this human disaster, and I think they just assumed that she’d change her mind eventually and take a reconstitution–preferably from a pre-mission backup. We all hoped she would, but on that point, she never wavered.”

He was nearing the end, and he was glad. Glad to be done with it. “So you see, Danek has his reasons for hating me, even if he says he’s put it behind him. I destroyed the woman he loved because I believed my own reputation, when I should have taken a little more time and just done the damned work. He’s right to be wary of my competence.” He felt sick, like he was going to vomit, but he battered down his own weakness. He had to finish it. “The funny thing, the worst part of it, is that we all failed. That’s all the Defense Ministry saw. We all received official Letters of Censure–for everything from dereliction of duty to spitting on the foredeck. Whatever they could think of that allowed the wonks to disavow the failure. Lily was a mess. Danek was forced into retirement. And Doss migrated to Earth, where he builds cruise liners. Hamers parlayed his organizational skills into a position on the Board of Directors for Hometown Mart. We won and it ruined us. They ran out on the war and all got rich.”

Amara said nothing for a time, and kept her eyes lowered, away from him. He didn’t know what to think, couldn’t read her reaction. Part of him didn’t care. He had paid a debt. Dorian rose to his feet. He needed to go to the bathroom.

Quietly, she said, “That’s why you don’t live on the Strand like most people, isn’t it? You don’t trust it. Because it failed you.”

“There are no secrets in text,” he replied. “The code doesn’t lie, it can’t hide anything from you.”

He walked away, crossed the room and locked himself in the bathroom.

Before the door was fully closed, however, he was certain he heard her whisper to him. I’m sorry, John.

Dorian vomited until his throat was raw.

<– Chapter 8 / Chapter 10 –>

<– Chapter 9 / Chapter 11 –>

They took up their places again in Lily and Danek’s sitting room. Dorian took the seat across the fire from Lily once more, so he could feel the warm stones against his back. It turned out to be evening, late evening, but still the same day. Dorian appreciated this fact. It made him feel like he was doing something productive, not wasting his time. His life was in shambles, but he hadn’t even wasted a full day before setting about putting things right. He told himself these things even if they did happen to be lies.

There were more lamps burning than there had been in the morning, and the room had taken on a cheerier aspect. This was partly in his mind, the product of a cleansing sleep and emotional distance from the events of the morning. Already, it seemed like a lifetime ago, and that, despite his lies, was dangerous thinking. The mind was too quick sometimes to divorce itself from pain.

Danek had set out a light meal of sandwiches, cheese and beer, the sort of meal Lily had once put out for them. He and Dorian and Amara ate standing around the dining room table. But Lily didn’t join them, and instead contented herself with a thick, grey paste which she sucked from light plastic tubes, eaten quietly and, it seemed, self-consciously as she alone on her mat in the corner. After the meal, Dorian had brought out his gear and between them, he and Danek strung a long roll of optical cable between the ex-connex router in the kitchen and the jack-pack Korski compiler that sat open in its case at Dorian’s feet. Lily winced when he flipped the power switch.

“That looks like military surplus,” Danek observed, leaning so far forward in his chair that Dorian expected him to tumble out of it. There was a greedy look in his eyes. The silver glow from the small monitor shone in his pupils like living sparks. “What is that, a T-212?”

“I wish. It’s a 186. Sometimes when I hit a ham-fisted site where they’ve deeply nested the seenop, the throughput is like trying to suck a meatball through a catheter tube.”

Danek grunted in understanding. “What filters are you running?”

“Just vanilla corporate Zydek on the surface. But I’ve augmented this unit with a cache processor that executes an anonymous second tier coreshield system using Shadowruption’s Vortex suite as the base. I added a few scripts and surprises of my own deeper in, but it all executes under the Zydek umbrella so it’s practically invisible to any curious sysops, and it doesn’t show up in most log configurations. The Strand sig is competent low-tech. Something you’d expect a geezer to run from home.”

“Pfft.” Danek snorted. “That was still state of the art military hardware when I joined TechTac back in the Stone Age.”

Lily laughed, but her voice was strained, as though she was fending off a headache. “Maybe you should let Tyrus run it, Johnny. He’s waxing nostalgic.”

“The idea,” Dorian explained, “is that it isn’t supposed to remind anyone of the military. Low tech enough that it won’t attract much attention on the random surf, but not so low that it looks like an interesting antique. I’ve altered some of the reg files just to be safe. They point to a cardboard persona I maintain on one of the public networks, so if anybody tags my id for later investigation, they find a plausible and distinctly uninteresting profile with a documented user hx.”

“Get on with it, already,” Lily said. “We trust that you’ve taken the proper precautions.”

He nodded once and set to work. Danek and Lily ran a standard rental ex-connex through a public network provider. There were billions of them in circulation, mostly temporary service ports for folks fresh off the zap or otherwise un-arrayed. Dorian unhooked the keypad from the Korski’s housing and pulled it into his lap. Legs crossed, watching the small monitor screen, he began to scrabble his fingers across the board, navigating the Korski’s ancient operating protocols and command driven connection apps. He used a standard public key to access the Strand, the sort you could purchase by the minute from retail kiosks in any major zap station concourse. Danek watched over the top of the screen with wary interest, divining what he could from the upside down text scrawl. To placate him, Dorian fired a signal flare that bounced his location pointers off a dozen far flung routers so that he was no longer just an anonymous connection, but an anonymous connection originating from Boardman’s Dome. Danek eventually sat back and let him work.

Lily chuckled dryly.

“This won’t take long,” Dorian assured them without looking up. “I’ve got most of the exploits I need to back door into my foam pre-loaded on this machine. I use the Korski sometimes when I’m planning on doing something particularly egregious that I don’t want traced back to any of my registered accounts, and I rebuild the core every couple of months so that it doesn’t look like the same box to anyone who gets curious.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Amara said. “Am I just being dense?”

“It means that you should all stop watching me and talk amongst yourselves for a bit. You’re making me nervous.”

Danek drew himself out of his chair. “I’m getting more beer. Anyone else?”

There were no takers, and he banged off into the kitchen, grumbling in the way he had all those years ago in the service. Busying himself with small, repetitive tasks was the manner in which Danek had always coped with stress. Dorian found comfort in the old habits for some reason. His fingers danced faster across the keys as he navigated the backbone of the Sting, nearer and nearer to his foam’s ip, plinking through standard firewalls and sentinel scripts like a fairy dancing across moonlit grass.

Lily gave Amara an apologetic look. “I’ll have to apologize. I’m not much for small talk, dear, unless it’s muttering to myself these days. And it’s hard for me to concentrate with the infernal racket that machine raises. Forgive me if I’m shouting.” She stroked the sides of her head with her hands. “It’s just so hard to hear myself think.”

“I can take this in the other room, Lil.” Dorian said, grimacing. “You should have said something.”

“I’ll be fine, John. Keep working.” She was quiet for a moment, then added. “I always liked watching you work. You get so serious.”

“I like it when he chews on his lower lip,” Amara said. “Isn’t it cute?”

“Talking about me was implicitly excluded in the talk amongst yourselves bit.”

“He’s sensitive, too,” Amara said, an aside to Lily.

“All artists are. It’s what makes them so charming.”

Danek returned, still grumbling, and dropped heavily into his chair. “Who’s charming? Talking about me behind my back again, eh?”

“John, dear.”

“The boy has chicken legs and the attention to hygiene of your average mollusk. In fact, I’ve known a fair number of mollusks who were more physically and intellectually charming.”

This assessment met with a raucous chorus of giggles.

“I have an idea,” Dorian muttered at them. “How about we take this time and set our obviously under-utilized thinking caps to the task of sorting out what happened this morning instead of using our powers for evil? That would be good.”

More giggles, except Danek, who boomed great shouts of laughter like a mortar assault. Gradually, the merriment died away and silence descended on the room. The only sound was the steady, rapid click of Dorian’s fingers.

“Let’s not all jump in at once,” Danek said, serious now.

Amara lowered her gaze to the floor and frowned, uncertain or embarrassed.

Lily sighed. Dorian heard unwillingness in her voice. “Bring it out again, if you would.”

Amara looked distinctly unhappy with the request, but Lily fixed her with a hard and implacable gaze. Her shoulders drooped, a bit, but she finally nodded her consent. She turned her head to the side as though the act itself was abhorrent to her, and withdrew the quae-ha-distra. Dorian looked up at that, unable to check his interest, despite himself. They all watched it, the way it glimmered and shone, except Amara. She held it as far from herself as she could, almost as if she wanted to hurl it into the fireplace.

Lily made a loud, wet exhalation. “Do you know what it is, Amara?”

“I know what’s inside it, or what it does,” she whispered back. “But I don’t know what it is, really.”

Danek, sounding both awed and angry for sounding awed in the first place, said, “I don’t care so much what it is as how it is. Explain that to me and I’ll be happy. Because what I’m seeing is still impossible.” He looked to Lily for confirmation. “It is impossible, right?”

But Lily wasn’t watching the orb this time. She sat with her head tilted carefully away from the orb so that she faced the wall, listening and nodding her head in a steady rhythm. After a time, she said, “It’s curious. Can you hear anything from it, Tyrus?”

“No.”

“Get closer. Tell me what you hear.”

He obeyed, but tentatively. It was clear that going too near the orb made him nervous. “Nothing,” he announced after a few seconds. “What do you hear?”

Lily shook her head. “It isn’t quite as clear as it was this morning, but I’m probably just catching interference from that blasted compiler. I was fairly certain then, but I needed to hear it once more to be sure. I can hear…what? Music of a sort, I suppose. It reminds me of singing.” She sat in silent thought, running her tongue around the inside of her mouth. “Do you remember George something-or-other, Tyrus? He was a Captain, I think. We used to go over to his house in Dayreme. His wife’s name was Nina.”

“Taute. George Taute. I remember.”

“They had that dinner party on Foundation Day, it would have been twelve or fourteen years ago, and he did that thing with wine glasses. Played them with his fingers. They made this music after a fashion. Clear, ringing tones, the pitch dependent on how much water was in the glass.”

“It was hideous, as I recall.”

“That’s what this sounds like, except that it isn’t hideous. It’s beautiful. Lighter, somehow, more resonant. The notes are perfectly, splendidly orchestrated.” Lily listened for a few moments longer, then said, “It’s a type of sonic vibration. Akin to what Captain Taute called his Music of the Spheres.”

Danek rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Okay. I’ll grant that it emits sound waves, even though I can’t hear them. You’re the expert on ambient noise in this family. That still doesn’t tell me anything useful. It doesn’t explain how it was able to translate from a coded Strand artifact into a physical object.”

“I suspect that it does. Sound waves are potent forces if properly harnessed. Directed sonic pulses have been used for quite some time in heavy mining operations to pulverize stone and bore deep shafts, especially in unstable atmospheric conditions where there’s too much risk with explosives. So we know that sound waves translate to energy just like other waveforms. What I’m proposing is that this code that Raville passed to Amara in a virtual experience was designed to interface with her array in such a way that it produced a precise combination of sonic vibrations. Those vibrations, that energy, iterated throughout her body, led to a consistent pattern of self-organization which ultimately constructed a replica of the virtual orb from Amara’s physical material.”

“Like a tumor?” Amara asked weakly.

“That’s a reasonable comparison, though I wouldn’t take it to a terminal conclusion, dear. The vibrations would have to be very specifically orchestrated, but it’s possible that they could be used to disrupt normal cell divisions and encourage a pre-determined pattern of mutation.”

But Danek held up his hand. “No, that doesn’t make any sense. She’s flesh and blood, Lil. That thing is something else. A crystalline compound of some sort, or even ordinary glass as far as I know. You can’t transmute flesh to a non-organic material just by fiddling with vibratory rates, not without nanomech intervention.”

Lily frowned at him, her lips twisting in a marred, uneven line. “Amara, forgive me if this is a personal question, but how many times have you been reconstituted?”

Amara looked stunned. “Twice.”

“And you mod semi-regularly, I assume?”

“Yes. A few times a year, depending on fashion.”

“You patronize upscale mod facilities, the sort with certified program designers and full medical support rather than chop shops. I don’t keep up with the latest advances, but I’d guess that your current modification wasn’t cheap. It came with full support systems, integrity maintenance protocols and–” Lily appraised her piercingly. “A young, single girl living in the city, in a neighborhood that isn’t exactly a war zone, but isn’t safe to walk in alone at night, either, yes? Did you pay extra for the diagnostic node?”

“It was part of the package. The physicians recommended it–a sub-catastrophic intervention device. Self-activating if my system registers sufficient trauma.”

“And being a dutiful employee of the Archive, you make certain to keep your personnel record up to date. Your mod history and your security images, your medical records.”

Amara nodded, but said nothing.

“What are you getting at, Lily?” Tyrus asked with a touch of exasperation.

“Stardust, Tyrus,” Lily said quietly. “She’s made of stardust and crystal. Processed silicate wafer re-engineered on the nanoscale into cognate organic material using her own packaged genetic pattern as the blueprint. She carries a standard, if dormant, programmable diagnostic node and a reservoir of med application nanomech drones specifically engineered for rapid dispersion and recombinant system construction. Probably not sufficient in and of themselves to make something as complex as the quae-ha-distra, but enough to greatly assist with the task begun by the sonic folding. This could be a technical design decision, or it could simply be that the genetic material is somehow inherent to the nature of the orb, something it needs to function as it should within the constraints of her physical universe. But the point is that everything Raville’s script needed to translate the artifact from virtual existence into reality was already a part of you, Amara. You were a perfect physical candidate.”

Amara chewed her lip. She gazed sidelong at the orb in her hand, torn between fear and wonder. “But that can’t be right. I wasn’t perfect. I was lost in there. I was worse than lost: I was overwhelmed. Wouldn’t John, with all of his crazy scripts and modifications, wouldn’t he have been a more logical choice?”

Lily dismissed the argument with a sour expression. “I wonder about Michael Raville, your Michael Raville, I mean. Caught up in his virtual prison for year after year, able to commune with the memory of gods, but not the gods themselves. Cut off from the divine touch. That’s a grievous thing to a man, who was made to worship. Men have a way of conforming themselves to their gods over time, obeying the urge to be pious until the man that they were vanishes and the man they believe their god would have them become takes his place.”

“You think Raville was being controlled by the Exousiai? That they chose me despite what he wanted?” Amara looked like she was on the verge of screaming.

“Perhaps not directly. But I would suggest that they influenced him, and that his story of being translated into the realm or the dimension of the Exousiai changed him fundamentally, in ways that he does not yet even understand.”

Amara answered this pronouncement with silence, still and profound. Lily softened her gaze and continued, nodding. “Yes, dear. You’ve been there also, and it may have changed you as well. You cannot touch the infinite without being transformed. Set it aside. There’s nothing you can do to change it now. You were chosen, that’s what matters. Raville might have chosen Johnny for perfectly logical reasons, but in the end, I think that logic wasn’t the motivation. Inside his own environment, he could have found ways to force John to accept the orb if he’d wanted to badly enough. I have to believe that. But he had just as ready access to your personnel data as he had to John’s, and something inside him compared Johnny’s compatibility with the orb against yours and chose you instead. Raville may not have even fully understood what he was doing.

“It seems likely to me he didn’t foresee this event, this thinning of the walls between the imaginary and the real. He was trying to pass knowledge to you, that was his conscious agenda. But he also knew that John could use that same data to do more than just carry out his desire to prevent war with the Exousiai. I don’t think he expected to give you a permanent key to his storehouse, and I don’t think that’s anything he would want. He wants to be able to control you out here just like he did in there. The physically manifested orb represents something new, something he didn’t count on. You want me to tell you why? I can see the question in your eyes, dear. I don’t know why. But it’s happened for whatever reason, maybe even because the Exousiai themselves willed it. You have to discover what it means, both of you, because it is the only element in this scenario that your opponents haven’t predicted and have not prepared themselves against. If you can figure out what it is and what it means, it may be a secret strength that can assist you when you need it most.”

“Or hurt you,” Danek tossed in. “If what you’re saying is true, Lily, the orb’s value depends on the intentions of the Exousiai and what they hoped to accomplish by giving it to her.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that Raville used me.” Amara snapped her hand closed over the orb, squelching its light. “I believed in him, and he used me.”

“It changes everything, Amara. John warned you that he wasn’t to be trusted,” Lily said. There was no sympathy in her tone. “You made the choice to be used, and it doesn’t matter if it was Raville who did the using or the Exousiai through him. You chose, these are the consequences. Deal with them.”

Danek sighed. “It doesn’t matter who chose her. The object remains. We need to know what it is, what it’s purpose is.”

Amara squeezed the orb until the flesh over her knuckles was taut, as if she wanted to shatter it. “It’s a portal,” she rasped. “It’s a door to another universe, to a place where gods walk and mind is being. A place filled with lightning and peals of thunder that are both somehow the speech of living, immortal gods. It is a world bursting with terrible, mighty, incomprehensible things. Madness and terror.”

Abruptly, as if suddenly recalling an experience she had forgotten, she calmed herself. The internal struggle rippled along the clenched muscles down to her fists. Her iron grip on the orb softened noticeably and she drew a breath that caught in her throat. Amara folded her arm and held the quae-ha-distra against her chest so that she cradled it against her breast like it was something precious. The light radiated against her downturned face, bathed her in its glow. “But it’s also beautiful and wondrous. Vast, rolling landscapes filled with light and glory and knowledge. The Exousiai are ever there, formless and yet immanent. The heaven and earth are filled with them, with their being and their voices and their song. A single, unified chant, a monad of ascendance which binds all things. There is no loneliness, no separation between you and me, them and us. Just ultimate, all-knowing, all-being oneness and the slow integration into that unity. It feels like home, a perfect and endless home, and being torn from it was like death. A death of emptiness and amputation that never, ever ends.”

Amara lifted her eyes and considered each one of them individually. There was something there, Dorian saw, an unspoken plea for comprehension or for an explanation that even Amara couldn’t fathom. A plea to be known without the need for explanation, without the distance of words and symbols and metaphors, because there was no language sufficient for the task. She had been in a land beyond language, a realm of pure and numinous thought, and words…words were just the debris humans piled against the infinite to make it comprehensible. “Lily is right, I suppose. It doesn’t matter who decided it should be given to me. It doesn’t even matter how it came to be inside me out here, off the Strand and in the real world. Even if we’re exactly right with our deconstruction of the method, it doesn’t signify. Because explaining the mechanism, the technical aspect of how something comes to be doesn’t begin to touch the ineffable why of it. Describe it all you want, understand the science, but that’s just another form of useless reductionism. Even if we never learn how it came to be, the isness of it, its fundamental being, remains as a divine mystery.”

Lily nodded. She nodded, Dorian realized, because she was always the first to understand the difficult things, the things that required human feeling. She softened her expression into a grimace that was both deeply disturbed and wholly compassionate. It was a look Dorian hadn’t seen on her in years. For just an instant, he saw her again, the old Lily he had known all those years ago. The beautiful Lily. “You’re right, of course. Understanding how the universe began doesn’t do anything to help those of us who have to live in it. Seeing a diagram of the wonderful, impossible complexity of our own genetic code doesn’t help us fit more comfortably into our own skin any more than a picture of fire will keep a man from freezing to death. We’re asking the wrong questions.

“It’s never been about what and how and why all of this has happened. It’s not about anything that we can parse into facts. It’s about purpose. What do these Exousiai want of us–as individuals and as a species? What are you supposed to do? What information does the orb exist to impart to you?”

The Korski spat a sudden, strident beep, and they all jumped. Dorian peered at the screen, then raised his head and said, “I may have found the answer to one of those questions, at least.”

“Tell me,” Amara said.

Help me.

He could taste her need as if it was inside of him, as if she was part of him. And she was, he supposed. He had known her, back at the Archive while she slept, seen more clearly into her being than she would have ever allowed him on her own terms. He had scrolled through her like a long and complex text, understanding in part, experiencing without context, glimpsing through a glass darkly. But he had experienced her all the same, and what is a man, but the sum total of his experiences? He would carry her inside him until the end of his days, just as he did every man whose living package he had ever corrupted, every enemy combatant he had been assigned to virtually assassinate. All of them were crammed together in a dense corner of his own rusting and moldy memory palace, stacked next to the secrets he kept and the things he could never say to her or to anyone else he had ever invaded.

His throat tightened. “Before…after we had met with Raville and he had given you the orb, he helped me gather some of the tools I’d need to…to assist you in extricating yourself from the place where you had gone, from the foam where Raville’s understanding of the Exousiai exists in a phenomenalist form. That environment, he said, was constructed on the pattern of his memory palace. A render of a real space. A simulated experience of a state of being. But because it was a construction, there were ways that it could be exploited. Because it was code, there had to be an underlying structure that could be grasped and manipulated independent of the application. I was able to enter the foam construct the orb created through a back door and extract the file structure into my own archives in a non-executable format. As code and documents. Raville told me that if I wanted to understand, if I wanted to help you, I should look for a particular file. He said it was the key to everything.”

“Have you found it?” Amara asked hungrily. He thought she might lunge at him.

Dorian chewed his lip and cast a glance at Danek. “I have, yes, but it’s not quite that simple. It’s an artifact of some sort, like he said, but it’s also an integral logical unit in the system architecture. Meaning that it’s code, yes, but it’s also an interface of some sort, a context dependent oracle. It’s meant to be unpacked inside the environment, and it can only be fully unpacked that way.”

“Wheels within wheels,” Lily obser