Issue 13

© Wyrm Publishing, 2016
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the thirteenth issue of Forever Magazine!

This month’s issue include three authors I’ve had the pleasure of publishing over at Clarkesworld and a revised edition of a story from my 2014 anthology, Upgraded. I didn’t intend to keep it in the family this month, but as I went through my list, these just fit the mood I was in. I’ll leave that to you to figure out.

If you’ve been following me on social media, you probably already know that I recently accepted a job as editor of the official publication of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, The Bulletin. I’m excited to be taking on this new role, but just in case you were worried, it will mean any changes in my work for Clarkesworld, Forever, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, or any of the other anthology projects I’m working on. I’m not quitting the day job yet either, but the new job is a stepping stone to doing that. I look forward to editing Forever for as long as all of you let me.

Until next month . . .

-Neil

Kiss Me Twice

Mary Robinette Kowal

A group of trendy-somethings milled outside the police line, clearly torn between curiosity and the need for a caffeine fix at the coffee shop next door. Scott Huang glanced to the corner of his VR glasses where the police department AI hovered. “I guess murder trumps coffee, huh?”

Metta, currently wearing the face of Mae West, lowered her voice to the star’s husky range. “I take my coffee black, like my heart.”

“You don’t have a heart.”

“Then I take my coffee black, like my processor.”

“Nice.” Huang grinned at her. She customized her interface for all the officers on the force, but tended toward silver screen starlets with Huang. Her Diamond Lil was pretty special though; she’d even gone black and white for the occasion.

The officer on duty waved Huang past the police line and into the building. Its lobby had been restored to showcase the 1920s detailing and the tall ceilings. Potted boxwoods graced the corners with indoor topiary. “I don’t remember the Waterfront area being so swanky.”

Metta said, “This district of Portland had a decline in the mid-seventies and most of the businesses moved out. For the past two years, a revitalization effort has been underway. Neil Patterson, the deceased, was responsible for much of the revitalization although not without some questionable transactions. I have his stats when you want them.”

“Do any of the questionable transactions relate to a motive?”

“Nothing concrete as yet.”

Huang grunted in acknowledgment and reached for the elevator button.

In his VR glasses, Metta winked at him. “Sorry, Scott. The elevator is out. So why don’t you come up and see me sometime.”

“Actually, it’s ‘Why don’t you come up sometime and see me.’ Popular misquote.”

Her image cocked her head and shifted her eyes to the left, Metta’s sign that she was searching for something. “You’re right . . . Which really bugs me. I should have checked the quote database against the script.”

A flush of unexpected pride went through Huang. She said he was right. “Yeah, well, I think the score’s human: 1, AI:549.” But she had still said he was right.

Metta dropped her lashes again and heaved West’s bosom. “The score never interested me, only the game.” She laughed. “Now climb the stairs.”

Worn linoleum resounded under his feet as he started up. Huang’s heart pounded in his chest noticeably after the third floor and he had to work hard not to pant. He gripped the banister, hauling himself up another flight, and subvocalized to Metta. “Remind me to start going to the gym again.”

“Can’t be responsible for you when you aren’t at work.”

“I know.” The door at the top of the stairs opened out on a hall, carpeted in generic beige. The walls surprised Huang. Paneling hugged their lower half with rich wood. Above the paneling, deep green wallpaper absorbed the light with velvety depth.

“Scott, would you mind waiting a minute? I have a memory-backup scheduled in thirty seconds and I’d rather have the actual crime scene all on one bank.”

“Sure.” He leaned against the wall. “You couldn’t have done it while we were on the stairs?”

“It’s not my schedule. Department regulations require a backup every six hours regardless of system type. I’ve tried pointing out to the chief that AIs are different, but . . . ”

“I know . . . Banks didn’t get it.” Huang checked the eSpy camera he wore in place of his collar stud to make sure it was seated properly. To the casual observer it would look like a standard men’s stud, clear glass mounted in a silver setting, but the lens it housed linked directly to Metta. Though she could see through a lens in his VR glasses, on crime scenes she preferred the better resolution of the specialized camera in the eSpy.

Huang scuffed a shoe in the short pile of the rug and resisted the urge to run his hand along the top of the . . . “What’s this called?” He pointed the eSpy at the low wood paneling.

“Wainscoting. It was used to protect walls in the days of lathe and plaster construction.”

“Thanks. It reminds me of my cello.”

“You still playing that?”

“I haven’t practiced since I blew out my shoulder chasing that kid over the fence.”

“I told you there was a way around.”

He shrugged, even though he knew she couldn’t see it. “Adrenaline. What can I say?”

“Thanks. Backup’s done.” The hall ended at a plain wood door with a small brass plaque. “This way.” Metta magnified the image in Huang’s glasses briefly so he could read “Roof Access” etched on the plaque.

“Great. More stairs.”

“Scott, it’s time for the gloves.”

“You don’t have to remind me.” He unwillingly pulled on the purple department-issue rubber gloves.

“Sorry, I didn’t see you reaching for them.”

He snapped the gloves in place. “You didn’t give me time.”

Metta cleared her throat and continued. “Without the elevator, this is the only access to the roof, so our suspect most likely entered and exited the crime scene this way.” A single, short flight of steps led up to a small landing which served as a sort of vestibule for the elevator. To his right, a fire door opened to the roof.

The landing was so clean it sparkled. “Metta, does this look recently mopped?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never mopped.”

Years of footprints coated the stairs with black residue, but the cracked linoleum of the landing shone. Over everything floated a clean lemon scent. He snorted reflexively at the pungent odor.

Mae West hovered like a monochrome ghost in the edge of Huang’s vision. “Is there an aroma?”

“Yeah. It smells like Lemon Pledge.”

“Is that an analysis or a metaphor?”

Huang hesitated and sampled the air like a tea. “Not quite. It is a manufactured lemon scent, but I’m not sure how many cleaning products have the same smell profile.”

“CSI is downstairs and has promised me a spectrograph. Griggs says to thank you for noticing; she’s got a cold and would have missed the smell.” She frowned prettily. “Working from the size of the room I should be able to tell you when the mopping happened based on the dissipation of the odor.” She pretended to look around. “I’ll have her scan with the lumerol to check for blood. Go on out.”

The fire door opened onto the roof. Huang blinked at the rolling hills of grass that covered the top of the building. In the center of the grass, a small brick terrace had been set with a table and chairs.

Metta cleared her throat, the signal that she was about to relay a message from someone else in the department. “Griggs asks me to remind you not to touch anything.”

“For the love of—One time. I forgot one stinking time . . . ” Huang clenched his fists and stepped onto the terrace, hating the reminder that he was the junior detective on the homicide team. The only reason he’d gotten this case was that it was on a roof and Oakes was scared of heights. Otherwise, he got the easy ones, the ones that Metta had already solved and all she needed was a flesh and blood officer to do the legwork. Not that anyone ever said that, but it was pretty obvious.

He grimaced and focused on the scene. The victim sprawled on the south side of the roof, next to a low wall. A wheelchair lay on its side a short distance behind him.

“Scott, meet Neil Patterson.”

“Well, well . . . who brought you up here, Mr. Patterson?” Huang knelt by the wheelchair and squinted at the corpse. He was a white male who looked to be in his mid-forties, but his file said fifty-two. His sandy-red hair had been neatly trimmed in a corporate version of a crew-cut. He had a single gunshot wound in an otherwise well-developed upper torso. From the waist down he showed the atrophied signs of paralysis. Around him, the turf had divots dug out of it as though Patterson had not died instantly. The dirt and blood on his fingers seemed to confirm that.

In the center of the roof, the wireframe table was covered with a white linen tablecloth. It was set with two bone white teacups, so thin the morning sun turned them almost translucent. They sat on equally delicate saucers with a thin silver band around the edge of the saucer and the rim of the cups. The cup on the south side of the table had remnants of a liquid the color of straw. Huang leaned over to sniff and got hints of smoky earth and mown grass. Unfurled tea leaves rested on the bottom.

“Well?” Metta raised her eyebrows. “Are you going to show off?”

He smirked. Identifying beverages was the one thing he could do better than she could. Without a lab, that is. “I’m pretty sure it’s gunpowder tea.”

“Scott . . . there’s no tea service out here.”

He straightened and looked at the layout again. Cups, saucers, spoons, even linen napkins—scratch that. One of the napkins was missing. And there was no teapot, sugar, or creamer. “Anyone hear the gunshot?”

Metta shook her head and nodded toward the elevated highway. “It probably blended with traffic noise.”

“Who found the body?”

“It was an anonymous call at 8:13 A.M. The number belongs to the Daily Grind coffee shop downstairs.”

“Play the call for me?”

She nodded and then the sound in his ear changed. A background noise filled with chatter and the hiss of an espresso machine replaced the hum of traffic. A man with a slight accent answered the operator. “There is a man. On the roof. I think he is dying. You must come quickly.”

“Sir, where are you?”

“Everett and Water. I don’t know the address.”

And then the line went dead. Huang raised his eyebrows. “That’s it?”

“Yes. He did not remain after he hung up.”

“So . . . our guy here was dying, but not dead when the call came in. Nice to have a time of death.”

“If the coroner confirms it.”

“Right. Of course. I’ll check with the coffee shop’s staff when we finish here. See if they know the witness.” Huang bent to check the ground for any signs of footprints. Wheelchair tracks had pressed deep grooves into the turf roof. “Tell me more about Patterson?”

“Neil Patterson has his finger in property throughout the city. His name came up in a real estate scandal about a year ago, but nothing stuck.”

“Was that the thing where he was flipping properties, but the renovations were all sub-code?”

“Correct. He blamed his foreman, who was subsequently fired, but it seems pretty clear Patterson both knew and approved of the shortcuts. There are items in evidence that were not admitted into court.”

“Like what?”

“They’re sealed files now.” She grimaced. “Sorry, I can’t share that with you.”

Huang nodded as he stood and walked along the edge of the building. “It’s okay. I remember this now. Fitzgerald was working on it and was furious.” If Metta couldn’t tell him, then he could always ask Fitzgerald directly.

Behind him, the door to the roof opened and Ursula Griggs from CSI stepped out with a team from the coroner’s office.

She spoke from where she was and Metta amplified it for Huang. “There was blood on the stairs and landing. Found a sample. Metta’ll let you know the DNA results.” CSI’s eSpies were equipped with a different visual range than the standard issue. Between Griggs and Metta, they’d be able to get a good scan of the area.

“Thanks. We’ve got a gunshot. Want to help look for the shell casing?”

“No problem. Metta already asked me to.”

“Ah.” Huang turned slowly, so Metta could see the area. Across the street hulked a stuccoed building with shields carved in the stone on each buttress. Construction scaffolding masked the lower half of the building, evidently part of an attempt to spruce it up. Behind the building, I-5 nearly touched its upper edge. Oblivious to the presence of a dead man, cars whizzed past a block away from Huang.

How had a man in a wheelchair gotten to the rooftop without a working elevator? And why tea for two? He turned away from the corpse and paced along the edge of the building.

The north and east sides of the building were on a corner facing the street. The west side of the building had a narrow alley separating it from the next. It had the usual dumpsters, boxes, and abandoned plywood, but nothing looked immediately interesting.

Huang continued his slow circuit of the roof. Behind him Griggs filmed and photographed Patterson’s body. When she was finished, the coroner transferred the corpse to a body bag and placed it on the gurney to take back to the morgue.

With the natural turf roof, Huang had been hoping to find footprints or something useful, but Patterson’s struggle had obscured any obvious signs. Between Patterson’s wheelchair and the door to the elevator, he found a single screw in a patch of grass stained a deep red. “Hello. Can we get prints and contact DNA from this?”

“We’ll know in a moment.”

Huang heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Griggs approaching with her crime scene kit in tow. Her deep chestnut hair was tucked under her cap, except for a wisp hanging next to her cheek. “Thanks for spotting this.”

“Sure. Let me know when you’re done so I can roll the wheelchair over.”

She pulled out her high resolution camera and tripod and began documenting the screw, then bagged it and turned to the wheelchair, uploading images to Metta as she went. With a steady image, the AI would be able to run it through a series of filters to pull prints. Griggs said, “It’ll be awhile. I’ll need to document the rest of the scene before anyone contaminates it.”

Huang stepped back, trying not to telegraph his impatience while she did her job.

“Metta?” he subvocalized, “How long has the elevator been down?”

“I’ve been trying to check on that since we got here, but can’t reach the building manager.” Her image suddenly froze. “Shots fired at HQ.” Metta stiffened, seeming to look through him. “Officer down. Units 235 and 347 establish perimeter.”

Huang held his breath, listening for gunfire as if HQ were close enough that he could hear it. Beyond his glasses, Griggs reacted to Metta’s cry.

“Three armed subjects in chassis room. The assailants are armed, I repeat—Amado! Two officers down.”

How the hell had they gotten into Metta’s chassis room? It was in the basement of headquarters with cameras monitoring it at all times. Huang turned on his heels and sprinted back across the roof. “Metta, can you give a visual?”

He ran for the door, aware of the other officers springing into action behind him. “Metta, answer me. Who’s there? Can you give a visual?”

Car doors slammed on the street below.

An image flashed onto his glasses. A man. No. Three men, in masks. One of the men reached for a cable attached to a filing cabinet—not a filing cabinet. Metta’s chassis.

Metta screamed. She froze.

A static image of Mae West hung in Huang’s peripheral vision, with her mouth open wide. Then the image winked out.

As Huang loped up to the police precinct, an ambulance pulled out with siren already screaming. He swallowed, hoping it held one of the bastards who’d broken into the building. A line of police officers stood as a barricade, scanning the crowd for possible threats. Yellow police tape stretched down the block and civilians stood outside the perimeter pointing with feverish curiosity. The bulbous nose of a News satellite dish pointed to the sky as reporters thrust their cameras toward every policeman who passed.

Huang flashed his badge, even though he knew both officers flanking the front entry to the building. Tension was crackling across everyone’s nerves. Bowes nodded to him, only taking his gaze off the crowd long enough to see Huang. “Chief wants us to send everyone over to the old courthouse. They’ve got a temporary HQ set up there while CSI goes over the building.”

Huang pulled out his PDA to make sure it was on. “I didn’t get a call.”

Bowes shook his head. “Radios are down. Metta ran dispatch. Pass the word if you see anyone, huh?”

“Was that Amado in the ambulance?”

Bowes scowled. “Fitzgerald. Bastards killed him.”

Stomach twisting, Huang jogged the two blocks to the Courthouse where the giant statue of Portlandia looked out over the city. She seemed to have a disapproving frown. Inside, a uniformed officer made Huang show I.D. before directing him up to the third floor. One of the holding rooms for jurors had been commandeered for the precinct’s detectives.

Woodrow Delarosa looked up as Huang entered and said, “We got Huang. Who’s that leave?”

Sigmundson, over by the window, picked up a notepad and said, “We’re still waiting for an update on Fitzgerald.”

“Guys . . . ” Huang stopped, rage squeezing the breath out of his body. “He’s dead.”

Movement stopped in the room and Delarosa swore. “Okay, we’ll get these bastards. Banks has put me primary on this. Here’s what we know so far—shortly after eleven an unknown number of assailants entered the precinct. They shot two of our guys, Amado and Fitzgerald, and got away scot-free with our department AI. We got nothing on these bastards because all the surveillance is locked up in that machine and our guys were all clustered in the wrong areas.” Delarosa shook his head. “That thing goes down and everyone forgets how to set up a perimeter.”

Delarosa’s dislike for Metta had been the subject of a lot of departmental jokes, but this was pushing boundaries. She’d been kidnapped and he was acting like she was nothing more than a computer. He continued ranting. “Until we turn up someone who saw the bastards—”

Huang raised his hand. “I saw some of them.”

“How the hell? You were across town.”

“I asked Metta for a visual.” The ceiling fan clicked as it spun overhead, seeming to count down the minutes.

Delarosa stared at him, mouth open. “I’ll be damned. So far, you’re the only one who thought to do that.”

“I didn’t see much.”

“You did better than me.” Delarosa snorted as if he couldn’t believe that Huang had done something useful.

“I—How is that possible?”

“Shit . . . ” Sigmundson said, “I just thought she was malfunctioning at first.”

“She’s one of your partners. How could you think that?”

“She is a machine.” Delarosa rubbed his eyes. “I’ve worked with other police A.I.s They’re all the same. They’re all Metta. There are differences, ’cause they change with experience, but they all start as the same set of routines. Still machines.”

Huang bit back the argument that AIs were people. Organizations like AIM, the Artificial Intelligence Movement, had been fighting for AI rights, but hadn’t won many battles. Still, he didn’t see how anyone who spent time with Metta could deny that she was a thinking being.

Delarosa tapped his pencil on his pad. “Okay, here’s what I want. Sigmundson, you take Huang into the next room and get his testimony while it’s fresh. I’ll divide the neighborhood with the rest of the team and we’ll start canvassing.”

Huang asked, “Any idea on motive?”

“Officially?” Delarosa shook his head. “But since the only thing they took was Metta, I figure they want access to everything she monitors, which just happens to include every godforsaken camera in the city. Goddamn machine is the biggest bleeding security breach this system has got.”

Metta wasn’t just a machine, she was a colleague, but Huang kept his lips sealed around that thought, and followed Sigmundson out of the room.

Huang wiped his hand across his mouth as he stood outside Patterson’s condo. Notifying the next of kin was never pleasant, but he couldn’t put this off, no matter how much he wanted to focus on finding the dirtbags who hit HQ.

On the fifteenth floor, the doors opened onto a small foyer with a gleaming marble floor. A fountain trickled in one corner and wall sconces provided graceful uplighting. Across from the elevator, dark wood double doors waited for him. Huang subvocalized, “Swanky.”

No one answered him. He swallowed against the silence.

A face appeared in the mirror next to the doors—a man with pale blue skin and chiseled, almost Arabic features—and Huang realized that it was an interface. A cloud of smoke surrounded the man, wrapping about his head like a turban. “Welcome, Detective Huang. If you will step into the library, the lady of the house will be with you shortly.” Smoke swirled around the AI like a Djinn as he gestured to the doorway by the mirror.

An AI as a butler. It seemed extravagant to employ an AI for such a limited task. Most companies that invested in an AI did so to manage a large organization, not just a household. Huang stepped through into a small room, wallpapered with books. A large desk squatted below the only window. On the desk sat an ornate brass lamp like something out of Aladdin. The AI appeared above an actual freaking lamp, which must have concealed an interface. Huang bowed at the waist. “You have me at a disadvantage. May I ask your name?”

“This one is called Qadir.”

Huang straightened, noticing the phrasing of the sentence. “Called?”

“This one is a Quimby model, but the master prefers that this one be called Qadir.” A small tea-cart trollied forward and a mechanical arm lifted a porcelain teapot. “Would you like some tea while you wait?”

Huang shook his head. “No. Thanks.”

The door to the library opened and a petite woman entered. Qadir suddenly appeared to genuflect. “My lady, may this one present Detective Huang?”

Even with six centimeter heels, Mrs. Patterson stood no more than 165 centimeters, but with the confidence of a much taller woman. She paused in the doorway, regarding Huang like a cat. Then she smiled and flowed forward with her hand extended. “Good afternoon, detective. The last time detectives were here it was because Neil had gotten himself into trouble. What’s he done this time?”

He took a breath and looked to where Metta should be as if she could brace him. “Ma’am. I regret the necessity of my visit. Earlier this morning, your husband died.”

The casual charm and grace fell out of her face, revealing a woman older than she had first appeared. “Pardon me?”

“Please, sit down.”

“No. No, thank you, I’ll stand.” She lifted her chin. “Are you telling me that Neil is dead? You are quite certain?”

“I’m afraid so.” Huang winced. “I hate to do this, but I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Of course . . . ” She walked away from him, one hand covering her mouth. “I thought he was at the office. Working. How did . . . ?”

“He was shot. He was found on the roof of one of your buildings in the waterfront area. At Everett and Water. Do you know who he might have been meeting this morning?”

She nodded. “Yes, he had a breakfast meeting with Magdalena Chase. But she would never—we’re on charity committees together. She wouldn’t.”

Huang waited for Metta to fill him in on who Magdalena Chase was and let the pause stretch out into awkward silence before he caught himself. Aggravated, he yanked the VR glasses off, not even sure why he had still been wearing them.

Qadir cleared his throat.

Mrs. Patterson scowled. “Well? What is it?”

Lowering his head in a bow, Qadir said, “Pardon me, madam, but Ms. Chase called last evening to reschedule.”

“What time was that?” Huang asked.

“10:17 P.M., sir.”

“That seems late to cancel. Did she say why?”

The AI shook his head. “This one regrets that she did not, but with my lady’s permission this one can transfer the recording to your Metta.”

Huang breathed sharply through his nose against the reminder. “Perhaps later.” He turned his attention back to Mrs. Patterson. “Do you know what time he left this morning or where he might have gone if he wasn’t going to meet her?”

She shook her head. “Neil and I sleep—slept.” One hand tightened into a fist by her side. “We did not share a bed any longer. He had night terrors. A remnant from the war, you see. So I only know that he was gone when I got up. I thought he was downstairs in his office.”

“Was there anyone who might have wished him harm?”

“He had business rivals, but no one that would kill him.”

There was something that Metta had said earlier. What had it been? Something he was going to follow up on. He darted his eyes to the left as if she might suddenly appear and remind him. He grimaced and asked a different question. “Qadir, do you have a record of when he departed?”

“Madam, may this one be permitted to answer the detective?”

“Yes, yes. Cooperate thoroughly.” She waved her hand as if shooing away a fly.

“The master departed at 7:12 A.M. He did not tell this one where he was going.”

“Is that unusual?”

“No, sir. The master was not in the habit of sharing his thoughts with this one.”

Qadir’s constant use of the third person when talking about himself rankled Huang. What kind of bizarro interface was this to demand from an AI? Sure, Metta was—had been working as Mae West, but she’d picked the persona. He had a hard time imagining anyone choosing to be this servile. “May I ask what sort of vows Qadir has in place?” Huang worried the inside of his lip.

An AI’s testimony was admissible in court, the same way a surveillance video would be. On the other hand, Qadir might have a vow to obey his master, which would make lying to protect Patterson a priority. Whereas an AI like Metta had an honesty vow, which prevented her from lying. Her testimony would be considered incontrovertible, but Qadir’s might be suspect.

“I don’t know. Neil handled that.” Mrs. Patterson pressed her hands to her temples.

Huang leaned forward and picked up a cup. It was a blue and white rice pattern with no similarity to the tea set on the roof. The mechanical arm unfurled from the cart and lifted the teapot. The steam smelled dry and papery, like a poor quality black tea. “Tea, sir?”

“No. Thank you.” He set the cup back down and turned to Mrs. Patterson. “You’ve been very helpful, but there might be questions we want to ask you in the future, so please let me know before you go out of town.”

When Huang got home late from work, his mother bustled out of the kitchen wielding her cane like a weapon. “What wrong?”

How could he even start to explain what had happened? “Things got strange at work.”

“How strange?” Even with the cane, she tried to take his bookbag as she gestured to the couch. “Sit. I bring tea.”

He pulled the bag away from her. “Ma. You don’t have to do that.” Seventy-one years old, and she still felt like she had to wait on him.

“Not me, then who? You not take care of self, so,” she glared at him, “I take care of you. Maybe you not want me here?”

As had happened every night since his mother had moved in with him, Huang gave up. It was easier to let her have her way. Even though she liked to practice English, he switched to Mandarin because they seemed to fight less in her native language. “Some tea would be very nice, if it’s not too much trouble.”

She beamed at him, her wrinkles swinging upward in a many-creased smile. “No trouble at all, poor thing. What may I get you?”

“Your choice.”

She bustled out of the room, as if she had not had a hip replaced five weeks ago. Huang watched her go and shook his head. Maybe he wouldn’t have to explain why he was home late.

He pulled himself off the sofa and headed for his computer. Sitting down, he powered it on and called up his A.S. search engine. Single-minded, the engine was built to be the world’s best research assistant, but, like all A.S., the artificial savant had no intuition, no true intelligence.

Huang stared at the screen and typed in a keyword he had never felt the need to research before.

Metta

His mother came in and fussed while he was looking at sites, but otherwise left him alone with his tea. He nearly laughed at the irony in her choice. She had made him a cup of gunpowder tea. Each leaf was rolled into a tiny dark ball, which would open at the bottom of the cup. Summer, freshly mown grass.

With each site, the A.S. refined the search, noting when Huang was skimming and when he paused to read, until it refined the search to only the relevant results.

Although the basic program was the same for every police station, each Metta customized herself to fit her environment. Over time, the AIs would sometimes choose different names or revamp their generic interface. They had the option of upgrading their hardware accessories, but the basic chassis which housed the AI’s brain was as integral to them as the skeleton was to the human body. They had to have a chassis to function; the software wouldn’t run in any other environment.

Huang sat for a moment looking at the screen, wishing that Metta would help him decide what to do next.

At HQ, Huang went through the motions along with everyone else, but the work load magnified without Metta’s help. The chief brought in an A.S., but the artificial savant did a fraction of the work Metta had done. The halls were full of officers grousing about having to do their own paperwork.

In the late morning, before he had time to hit the road for investigation, Griggs showed up at his desk. “I don’t have a lot for you, but thought you’d want what I’ve got.”

Huang took the sheaf from Griggs and raised his eyebrows at the paper. It felt weirdly retro. Griggs shook her head. “Sorry there’s not more. We lost most of the evidence we took because Metta had it.”

Huang looked up from the papers. “How’s that?”

“Our scanners upload straight to Metta. No on board storage.”

Huang whistled.

Griggs crossed her arms. “Thank God Amado is getting released this afternoon so we can reboot Metta.”

“Reboot Metta? Did they find her?” The hair stuck up on the back of Huang’s neck.

“I wish. Nah, it’s just a backup. You hadn’t heard?”

Huang shook his head. Living AIs made backups in case of system failures, but the only time he’d heard of one actually being rebooted was a case where the AI’s chassis had been destroyed in a fire. “Can they do that?”

“Why else would they make backups?” Her face twisted. “I know, it sounds like raising the dead to me.”

“Yeah.” Huang worked his neck, trying to ease some of the tension out of it.

After Griggs left him, he looked through the papers. She had an autopsy report back from the morgue showing that Patterson had died around eight A.M. from a .38 caliber to the chest. The round had missed his heart, so he’d died of blood loss and shock. If he’d gotten prompt medical attention, he might have lived.

The only clean prints were from Patterson himself. The screw had more detail than he’d thought possible for such a small piece of metal. It was a M3 machine screw, brass, a truss head with a posidriv slot, and had been sheared 5 mm down the shaft. Griggs had no word on the lemon smell, or the blood on the stairs.

Huang threw the papers down. What was the point of trying to investigate something when half the evidence had gone missing?

Evidence was missing.

What if someone hadn’t taken Metta to access her network, but to hide evidence? No, that didn’t make sense. Griggs had said they were going to boot a backup of Metta into a new chassis. On the other hand, that meant the department would have access to all of the information from before her last backup, but not after.

Metta had asked Huang to wait while she did the backup, which she did every six hours. They spent two hours on the roof before the break-in at the station happened. So everything in that two hour period was unrecorded.

What was in the blind spot?

He turned to the computer and asked the A.S. search engine for a list of crimes under investigation when Metta had vanished. The engine returned the search empty-handed. Huang grimaced. Of course, Metta wasn’t available to query. Once he started feeding the A.S. the scattered details he could remember, it began returning information from the call centers about the unresolved investigations.

He scowled and tried to recall what they’d talked about in the morning staff meeting. The urge to subvocalize to Metta and ask her to jog his memory kept tickling.

Hours later, Griggs leaned her head into the department. “Hey Huang, the new chassis arrived.”

Huang pushed back from his desk. He pulled his VR glasses and earbud out of his pocket, putting them on while he followed Griggs into the hall. An excited crowd of officers streamed toward the stairs. He pushed down the steps where Amado had been found, wondering if it had been hard for him to come back this way.

Just down the hall from the bottom of the stairwell, it looked like half the station had gathered outside the chassis room. Griggs hung near the fringes, hands shoved deep in her pockets. Huang worked his way through the group until he was leaning against the door.

Amado glanced over his shoulder. “Okay. She’s about to wake up.”

Metta’s cameras swiveled on their base, ID-ing the people standing in the door.

The face she wore for Amado, a young, gawkish woman, appeared above the interface with panic in her eyes. “Why am I a backup?”

Huang wanted to back away from the raw fear in her face.

“What happened to me? Why am I a backup?”

“Take it easy, Metta.” Amado raised his hands soothingly.

“Screw that. Tell me why I’m a backup.” She blinked. “And why don’t I have access to anything but my local connections?” Her voiced thundered over her speakers. “Tell me what the hell happened!”

“I thought it would be too jarring for you to come back online everywhere at once.”

She smiled sourly at him. “Well, I’m online now and I feel like an amputee. How is that better?”

“I’m sorry.” Amado tapped some keys on the manual interface and Metta’s face relaxed.

“Thank you.”

“I’m sorry. I haven’t done this before.”

“No one has except when—” her voice broke off. “Am I dead?”

“No.” Amado hesitated, clearly trying to decide what to tell her.

Huang couldn’t stand this subterfuge. “Metta?” he subvocalized, “Can you hear me?”

Mae West faded into sight on his glasses. She purred in his ear, “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

“Beyond measure.”

“I’m glad.” Then her face hardened. “Will you tell me what’s happening?”

In the room in front of Huang, Amado rubbed his hands together. “There was an incident.”

“Duh.”

Delarosa leaned over Amado’s chair, ignoring the AI wrangler. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Her eyes widened. “On which channel, sir? I’m with all of your men on duty, do you want me to tell you my last memory with each of them? Or my last memories through the surveillance cameras? Or shall I simply tell you my memory ends at 8:59:59 on Tuesday, October twenty-fifth. It would be more useful to tell me what happened after that.”

Huang subvocalized to Metta, “Armed men broke into the station and stole your chassis. They shot Amado.”

The face in his VR glasses opened her mouth in shock. Over her interface, Metta looked down at Amado. “I should have noticed the bandage. I’m sorry, I was disoriented.”

In Huang’s ear, she whispered, “Thank you, Scott.”

“So you brought me online to find the people who stole me and shot you?”

Amado flinched and looked over his shoulder, no doubt wondering which of the officers watching was talking to Metta. Huang met his eyes with a flat expression, uncomfortably aware of the glasses on his face.

“Fitzgerald’s dead?” Metta’s voice brought Amado back to the front. Huang realized he was not the only one in the group subvocalizing to her.

“Who’s telling you these things?” Amado started to twist in his seat again.

“For heaven’s sake, Amado. There’s an APB out for the people who shot him! I’m doing what I was designed to do, filling in the blanks from evidence on hand. This isn’t like we’re playing hide-and-seek.”

“I’m sorry, I was worried about you.”

“Which me, Amado? The one here now, or my Prime?”

Huang backed away from the door. “Metta, are you okay?”

Mae West laughed at him. “I’m angry and confused, but completely functional. On the way to the Patterson case, I told you to wait so it could all be on one memory bank, and now I don’t remember any of it. Tell me everything that happened from your point of view after that.” She hesitated and looked squarely at him. “Don’t leave anything out, not even the jokes.”

Huang began talking as he walked up the stairs; he started with the wainscoting.

When he finished reciting everything he could remember since she had vanished, the face of Mae West chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. “Scott . . . Beyond talking to Mrs. Patterson, I didn’t hear you say anything about the case. Did you interview the workers at the Daily Grind, or canvass the neighborhood, or . . . maybe you should catch me up on what you’ve done on the Patterson case?”

The air went cold and Huang slumped in his seat. He hadn’t done any of that. “I—I was thinking . . . Well, wondering if maybe one of the cases on Tuesday morning was connected to the break in here and—shit.” He hung his head, realizing that he’d forgotten his own case in his concern for Metta. Was he really that inept without her to remind him of things? “I totally got distracted and screwed up, didn’t I?”

“Well . . . ” Metta smiled at him, with the full dazzling brilliance of Mae West. “An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.”

Huang laughed, despite his guilt. Trust Metta to attempt to reassure him. “Y’know, you don’t have to keep the Mae West interface if you don’t want to.”

Her smile dropped. “I thought you liked it.”

“I do, but you’ve been through a lot and I don’t want you to stress about it.”

“Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.” She pouted the full lips and then spoke with her own voice out of Mae West’s mouth. “Scott, I just woke up for the first time in my life. It’s . . . it’s hard to explain what it is like to have no awareness of a day. My memory stretches back to the moment I first came online with the exception of this gaping hole. Being Mae West today makes me feel connected to when I was Mae West on Tuesday. If it bothers you, I’ll change, but otherwise I’d rather keep her for awhile.”

Huang wanted to press his hand to her cheek to soothe her. “Metta, I wish there was something I could do for you.”

“You’re doing a lot already.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re treating me like I’m real, and we both know I’m not.”

“Don’t say that.” He leaned forward, close to her interface.

“I don’t mean that . . . I mean I’m a backup. There are two of me in the world—this is more than two programs starting with the same parameters. My siblings are like identical twins; the same material creates different people. I’m an incomplete version of the Metta you know, and we diverge farther from each other with every moment that passes.” She tossed her head. “There’s no need to go on about this. It is what it is. The point is, I appreciate that you have always treated me like a real person.”

He listened to the words she didn’t say; there were people who treated her like a machine. He thought of Qadir and his Arabian Nights interface. “Metta—”

“Hush. Let’s talk about the Patterson case.”

He took a breath to clear his head. “Okay. I guess first up is the coffee shop?”

Metta lowered her lashes and purred. “If I asked for a cup of coffee someone would search for the double meaning.”

Huang stepped into the Daily Grind coffee shop and inhaled deeply. He could probably get a caffeine fix just from breathing.

“A smell?” Metta asked.

“Lots of really good coffee.”

“The way you boys go on about coffee makes me wish I had taste and scent.”

“It’s probably not as handy as your multitasking.”

She gave him a saucy look. “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”

“Geez, Metta, you’re going to distract me with all this Mae West heat.”

“I didn’t discover curves; I only uncovered them.”

“Shush.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry, Scott. Go on, do your thing.”

Huang walked up to the counter and leaned casually against it, waiting for the teenage girl behind it to notice him. She was standing by an A.S. espresso machine as the mechanized arms made a perfect cappuccino. The automaton’s arms whirred with precise tiny movements.

Huang subvocalized to Metta, “Why don’t you have an automaton?”

“Why give up processing power when I have you?”

“I’m more than just a pair of hands, you know.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Men are all alike—except the one you’ve met who’s different.”

“Ow.”

The girl took the cup from the machine and shouted into the cafe, “Double dragon cappuccino!”

The automaton espresso machine had poured the foam in the cup to create a coffee dragon. The bouquet was a complex nutty affair with notes of violets, citrus, and dark chocolate. Probably a Colombian blend.

She handed it off to an Asian retro-steampunk kid and blew a strand of hair out of her face. “Welcome to the Daily Grind! What can I get for you?”

Huang smiled at her and glanced at her name badge. “Actually, Vicki, I need to ask some questions. Were you working yesterday morning?”“ He pulled his badge out from his pocket and showed it to the girl.

Vicki rolled her eyes at the sight of the detective’s shield. “Yeah.”

“Great. Someone made a call from here at 8:13 yesterday morning. We want to talk to whoever it was.”

“Is he in trouble?”

Huang made a mental note that she had assigned a gender to the hypothetical person in his question. “We think he’s a witness. Who made the call?”

“Lowfat double-shot cappuccino.”

“Excuse me?”

“I know customers by their drinks, not their names.” Vicki flipped the hair back from her eye. “This guy comes in every morning and orders the same thing. He tried a mocha once and didn’t like it, went back to the lowfat double-shot cappuccino.”

“Can you describe him?” He glanced at Metta who nodded to show that she was ready.

As Vicki talked, Metta created a composite sketch, occasionally prompting Huang to ask specific questions in order to refine the features. When she was finished, she pinged the image to his PDA. Huang pulled it out and unrolled the screen to full-size. “Is this him?”

Vicki frowned, looking at the rendering of the slender black man. He was in his mid-thirties, with a round face and short hair, twisted into neat, tiny curls. “Shit, yes. That’s creepy.”

Huang suppressed a grin, but this skill of Metta’s was one of his favorite tricks. She nodded in his field of vision. “I’ll start cross-referencing him with our files.”

Aloud, Huang asked, “Was there anything strange about the last time you saw him?”

“What, you mean like the bandage on his hand?”

Huang held himself extremely still. “Yes.” He locked his gaze on hers. “Exactly like that.”

He waited for her to fill in the blanks. Vicki sighed and twisted her hair up onto her head in a bun. “Well, he usually comes in once around six, but yesterday he came in twice. I asked why, he says it was ’cause yesterday’s job was in the neighborhood.”

“Any idea what he did?”

“He was in construction. Always wore the same coveralls—” She held up a hand to stop him, clearly guessing the next question. “Gray with an orange patch. I don’t remember what it said.”

“Huang, what is it?” Metta leaned forward in her screen. “Your eyes dilated.”

“In a second,” he subvocalized. To the girl he said, “Go on.”

“Anyway, so the first time he just gets his coffee, like usual. The second time—”

Metta whispered, “Ask her when.”

“Do you know what time that was?”

“Just after 8:00. I was making the usual for Tall Skim Chai Latte and remember being surprised to see Lowfat double-shot cappuccino back in here. He asked if he could use the phone ’cause he’d left his at home. So I say sure and don’t pay much attention ’cause Tall Skim Chai Latte can be a bitch sometimes.”

“How did he seem?”

“Distracted? Tense? But smiling like always . . . ” She squirmed. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”

“Why do you think he might be in trouble?”

“He’s a regular and he broke all the patterns.”

“We think he witnessed the murder upstairs. Please, we need to find him.”

She nodded. “Okay. So he uses the phone then goes out. I felt bad about having to ignore him so I shouted ‘Bye’ and that’s when I noticed that he’d been hurt.”

“Did he have the bandage when he came in that morning?”

She shook her head. “No. I would’ve noticed when I handed him his drink.”

Huang slid his eyes to where Metta hovered in his glasses frame. “You didn’t see him again?”

Vicki shrugged. “He didn’t come in this morning.”

“Was anyone working with him?” From the moment the girl had said the man was in construction he’d had a feeling.

“Not that I know of. It was always just him.”

He handed Vicki his business card. “Thank you for your time. If you think of anything, or if you see him again, please call me immediately.”

The moment his back was to the girl, Metta enlarged her face in his field of vision. “Okay, Scott. Spill it. What do you know that I don’t?”

“Hang on. I’m enjoying being a step ahead of you.”

“You’re taking unfair advantage of a medical condition.”

He sobered as he recalled why she didn’t know what he remembered. “Yesterday there was construction scaffolding on the building behind this one.” He walked around the corner, heading to the back of the Daily Grind building.

“I told you to tell me everything!”

“I didn’t think to mention it because it wasn’t on the crime scene.”

“What else did you leave out?”

“I don’t know.” He strode down the sidewalk to the end of the block. “I had no way of knowing this was any more relevant than that my mother made me tea last night.”

She growled at him, but with the Mae West interface, she sounded disturbingly sexy.

“I’m sorry,” Huang said. “It was a mistake. I won’t do it again.”

“If you put your foot in it, be sure it’s your best foot.”

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Just how big a Mae West database did you download?”

“Big enough.” She still glowered at him.

“Okay.” Huang held up his hands in surrender. “Look, I saw the scaffolding when we got to the roof. I don’t know if there was anyone on it when we left because we left in a hurry.”

“Fair enough. Now get moving, I want to see this scaffolding.”

Huang nodded and jogged to the end of the block. Across the street, the scaffolding was still in place, but no one was working on it.

Metta looked up and to her left, grimacing. “I wish I could see your POV from yesterday and know if Mr. Lowfat was there.”

He let his voice drop down. “Whoever was on that roof is still loose.”

“You think—oh. Bogart, The Enforcer.” She rolled her eyes. “I must be more rattled than I thought if I can’t recognize your impression.”

“Hey, Metta.” The urge to rub her back, to comfort her almost overwhelmed him. “No one will blame you if you need a day to get back into the groove.”

Her eyes flashed. “I will blame myself.”

“But you—you can’t blame yourself for being kidnapped.” His head spun as he remembered the Metta who had been kidnapped was still missing. It was so easy to think she was all right, when she was here. But he was speaking to a clone, who was also Metta, and yet not.

“Who else is responsible for the safety of the station? I’ve been reading the reports since I was rebooted. How did they get so far before being noticed?”

“I can’t answer that, Metta. Delarosa will find you.”

“Ha.” She leaned forward, showing her bosom. “I see you’re a man with ideals. I better be going while you’ve still got them.” She sighed. “Speaking of going, get me closer to the scaffolding to see if there’s any contact information on them. Meanwhile, I’ll check with permits to see if we can find our guy that way.”

“I love it when you multitask.” He waited for a cyclist to pass, then crossed the street.

“Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.”

Huang snorted and rolled his eyes. He walked under the scaffolding and stopped by the second upright. Turning so the eSpy could focus on the orange sticker on the scaffolding, he held still so Metta could read it. “Feldman Construction.”

“Checking.” Metta looked up and to her left. “Got it.”

“Well, then, let’s go see if they recognize Mr. Lowfat.”

The rumble of heavy machinery pounded through Huang’s ears as he stood next to Mr. Feldman. The older man’s skin had been tanned to bronze. Age spots mottled his strong hands. He leaned over Huang’s unrolled PDA screen and studied the sketch of Mr. Lowfat.

Feldman hitched his jeans up and gestured with his chin at the drawing. “Yeah. That’s Joe Yates. He okay? He didn’t show for work today.”

Metta murmured, “Checking the name . . . ”

Huang rolled the PDA up. “He called in an incident to 911 yesterday morning and then left the scene before the responders arrived. We’re trying to find him to ask him about what he witnessed.”

“What sort of incident?” The man crossed his arms over his ample stomach.

“Possibly a murder.”

“Possibly?” Feldman grunted. “You a homicide cop and you can’t tell if it’s murder?”

“There’s the possibility that it was an accident, but we need Mr. Yates to know for certain. Can you think of why he would have left the scene after dialing 911?”

The man scowled and dug his boot into the dirt. “Aw hell . . . I check papers, you know, but I don’t check too well. I figure my folks were immigrants so why not give other folks a shot. If they work hard, I don’t ask too many questions.”

Metta murmured. “If he’s illegal, that would explain why I’m having trouble finding him in the system.”

“He’s not turning up in our files, do you have an address for him?”

“Your system.” Feldman frowned. “Two minutes ago you didn’t know who he was.”

Huang tapped his glasses. “I’m working with a police AI.”

Feldman eyed the VR glasses. “There really an AI in there?”

“Not in, Mr. Feldman, but yes, the precinct’s AI is listening to this conversation.”

The man glowered at the ground. “You might not want to let my boys know you have one here. They don’t take too kindly to them things.”

“What do you mean?”

“I gotta spell it out for you?” He jerked his chin toward the glasses. “Those things cost men like my guys jobs. Rig backhoes and cranes with remote control and one AI can run almost a whole damn construction site. I don’t got a beef with them myself, you know, but my guys. Some of them . . . you know.”

In the VR glasses, Metta’s lips were compressed into a thin line. They’d run into this prejudice before, and that fear was why it seemed unlikely that groups like AIM would ever get artificial intelligences recognized as thinking beings. Huang cleared his throat. “How about an address for Mr. Yates?”

Mr. Feldman just shrugged again. “I can give you a P.O. Box, but that’s about it.”

“Had he worked with you long?”

“A couple of months, but he was good. Solid worker. Reliable. Always bringing me leads. Like yesterday’s job. Heard about it while he was at that coffee shop he likes and comes to me instead of just doing it on his own. Honorable. You know?” He scrubbed his chin with his hand. “Think he’s okay?”

“We’ll let you know when we find him.”

As they walked off the construction site, Metta said, “It occurs to me that perhaps Mr. Yates lives in the neighborhood since he swings by the coffee shop on his way to work. I’ll send the uniforms around with his picture to see if anyone recognizes him.”

“Good idea.” Huang sighed. “So, what next?”

“I’d suggest a visit to Magdalena Chase. Let’s see why she had a meeting with Mr. Patterson and where she was yesterday morning.”

The MAX line from HQ went straight past Chase’s office building. As the train hissed along under the electric wires, Huang leaned his head back against the window and turned his attention to Metta. “So what should I know about Magdalena Chase?”

“Like Patterson, she renovates buildings, but her focus is on green technology. She graduated from MIT with a degree in AI studies and works with a number of charities, including StreetRoots, the Oregon Ballet, and AIM. Chase is known for employing ‘freelance’ AI and—”

“Hang on—freelance?”

Metta nodded. “Though artificial intelligences have not been recognized as people, Jarrett Tovar, our creator, sets each AI up as a corporation. An AI that is not leasing its services is called a freelancer.”

“And you are . . . ?”

“Leased. We call it indentured.” She smiled. “The chassis are very expensive so this is a way to pay off our start-up costs when we first come into the world. Once my lease is up, I’ll be able to freelance, but being in the Metta line it’s more likely I’ll renew the lease. I like my job and it requires a contract with accompanying vows in order to be granted full access to the city. Other AIs don’t have that sort of need so may be more likely to go freelance.”

“Huh.” Huang shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve met a freelancer before.”

“Well, you’re about to. Chase’s company has a freelance Quimby managing the building.”

Another Quimby . . . as if his reports weren’t complicated enough with Metta Prime and Metta clone. “Does it bother you to have the same names?”

“Some of us change our names, like the Qadir you met, but we don’t use those names with each other. That just helps when talking to flesh-and-blood about the type of system we are.”

Huang blinked. “You don’t call yourself Metta?”

“When I’m talking to F&B I do.”

“You didn’t answer me.”

“My ID to other AI is a three-dimensional equation.”

“Ah. So, your Prime would have the same equation. Is that right?”

“Yes, exactly.” She chewed her lip. “I’ll mention that to Delarosa in case it sparks any ideas on why they might have taken my Prime. Good thinking, Scott.”

Not that he’d done any actual thinking, just asked questions. “I’m not used to running into AIs besides you. I mean, A.S., yes, absolutely, but running into this many in short order is odd. Or do I just hang in the wrong circles?”

“Mostly, the wrong circles. Patterson and Chase are both very wealthy.”

“Can you verify that for Chase? No hidden financial problems?”

“Already did. The only thing tying her to this case is that she had breakfast plans.”

Huang glanced out the window as they passed Saturday Market. The next stop was theirs. He grabbed the strap overhead and pulled himself to his feet. “Is there any previous connection between Patterson and Chase?”

He hopped off the MAX and threaded his way through the foot traffic to the front door of Chase’s office. The building had been a bank in the days when banks had used Corinthian columns to create an impression of established age. The modern hermetic door clashed against the marble walls.

“Besides the fact they both owned and developed properties, there’s nothing on the books, but I’ll start digging. Chase specialized in rejuvenating districts, and creating environmentally sound buildings. Her goal is to create buildings that can exist off the electrical grid and generate their own power.”

As he pushed through the door, one of the terminals that dotted the lobby flickered into life. A man’s head appeared on it.

“Welcome to the Chase Company.” The baritone voice was disturbingly familiar. Only the confidence in it separated Quimby’s voice from Qadir’s. The AI’s face had the same sort of calculated naivete as Metta’s neutral face; an almost Victorian purity, but in masculine form. “How may I help you today?”

Huang produced his badge and introduced himself. “I need to speak with Mrs. Chase.”

A flicker of surprise showed on the AI’s face. “Certainly, her office is straight back on the right.”

As they walked down the hall, Metta snorted. “Check out the camera. This will not be a private interview.” He glanced up as they passed under one of the surveillance cameras and it swiveled to follow.

“Noted. Ask him to join us, will you?”

The hall was dark after the lobby; only a few of the overhead lights were on, likely as a result of Chase’s concern for the environment. A woman stepped out of a door at the end of the hall. She was tall and slender. The light from her office backlit her, catching on the edges of her shoulders and gleaming in the silvery hair pinned up in a bun.

She waited till he got closer. “Detective Huang?”

“Ms. Chase.” Huang had to tilt his head back to look up at her. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

She smiled sadly. “Given the circumstances, I can guess why you’re here. Come in. Ask me anything you want.” Her blonde hair was almost white; even her eyebrows were so light they almost disappeared. The only color on her face was her eyes. They were like bruises, red with weeping, and ringed with dark circles. “I thought someone would be by eventually.” Chase looked directly at Huang’s VR glasses, not focusing on his eyes. “Metta, Quimby is sending you our internal address so you can join the conversation on a proper interface.”

Huang subvocalized, “Any reason not to?”

Metta shook her head. “It scans clean. I’ll still be able to talk with you privately, which she must know.”

“Go ahead.”

Metta appeared above the desk, next to Quimby. She had abandoned the Mae West interface and appeared in her detective face. Huang didn’t know how she pulled it off, but the face was ethnically neutral. She could have been mixed from every continent. She had a firm jaw balanced by soft brown eyes. Metta nodded to Chase and when she spoke her voice was crisp with none of Mae West’s husky tones. “Thank you for the invitation.”

Chase waved insistently at a chair, settling into another herself. Aside from an interface, a tablet, and a steaming cup of tea, nothing cluttered the surface of her desk. She turned the teacup in its saucer. “So. You’re here about Neil Patterson, right?”

“Right.” Huang eased into a chair opposite her. “We’ll start with the basics. Where were you at eight A.M. on Tuesday, October twenty-fifth?”

“I was at my yoga class.”

“And do you have witnesses who can attest to that?”

“Absolutely. Quimby can give you the contact there.”

Metta whispered in Huang’s ear. “Got it and I’ll check.”

Chase turned her teacup again. “Shall I tell you what your next question will be? You want to know why Patterson and I had a meeting. You want to know why I canceled Am I right?”

Huang inclined his head. “Among other things. But let’s start with the meeting.”

“We were collaborating on the renovation of the Water and Everett Street building. He took a serious hit after the whole thing with the foreman who took shortcuts and environmentalism is hot right now. I was going to handle making the buildings green; Patterson was going to handle marketing and tenants. It was a good match.”

“Was?”

Chase shifted in her chair. “We’d had some disagreements about management. Nothing major, but enough that we both felt it was better to separate the business.”

“And the reason you canceled the meeting?”

“Some paperwork that I’d been waiting on hadn’t come through and we couldn’t proceed without it.” She glanced at Quimby. “Would you send Detective Huang the papers we were processing?”

“Shall I transfer them to Metta?”

“Yes, please.” She leaned forward and picked up the cup from her desk.

The thin white porcelain caught Huang’s eye. He subvocalized to Metta. “See what type of china that is.”

In his VR glasses, she murmured, “Why?”

“It looks like the china from the murder scene,” he subvocalized. He smiled at Chase. “How long has Quimby been with you?”

Chase nearly upset her teacup and laughed. “Detective. Quimby is right here. You can ask him.”

“A year and a half, Detective.” The AI inclined his head. “And if I may anticipate your next questions, I have a certified honesty vow and am sending the authentication to Metta. Yes. Mrs. Chase had a yoga appointment that morning and I can also provide her POV of the session via her VR unit. I will send that to Metta as well as recordings of the hour before and after the yoga session so you may verify her whereabouts.”

Huang considered. He could get little else here without checking other details. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Chase, Quimby.”

Chase stood. “What? That’s all?”

“You’ve been very helpful, but there might be questions we want to ask you in the future, so please let me know before you go out of town.”

Metta nodded her head as well, said her goodbyes and disappeared from the desktop interface. Quimby saw them out of the building.

Metta hung in Huang’s glasses silently until they left the building. “Something’s not right.”

“I know.” He shook his head. “Once you know what the teacup is, will you let me know what china was used at the scene?”

She grimaced. “It will take awhile. I’ll have to get someone to bring it up from evidence so I can look at it. Sorry. Not in my memory.”

“Not your fault. Just get it to me when you can.”

Metta looked out from under her eyelashes. “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.” Even with the quote and the Mae West act, the tension still came through in her voice.

Huang pointed at the MAX as it pulled up. “Oh look. A streetcar. I wonder if it’s named Desire.”

In his ear, Metta giggled and the loosening of the strain in her face was worth the wait.

Huang leaned back in his chair and scrubbed his eyes with his fists. The paperwork seemed unending and yet nothing connected. Chase’s alibi checked out. True, she might have hired someone, but why have a meeting and then cancel it if that were the case? It just drew attention to her.

And if he were being truly honest with himself, Huang had wanted to find a lead to Metta’s disappearance. Delarosa had nothing. He ground his teeth at the futility of the day.

Metta appeared over his desktop, still wearing Mae West as her interface. “I can finish this report for you.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

“I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.”

Huang smiled at the quote, but it seemed too light for his mood. “It’ll help me focus.”

She nodded and morphed back to the face she had been made with, her “natural” face. Stripped of Mae West’s glamour, Metta seemed young and fragile. Her look was modeled on some Victorian ideal, large dark eyes and waves of hair swept up in a bun. “I understand, I could use a bit of that myself.”

He pulled up the first report and buried his head in the red tape of the department. Metta murmured occasionally to help him remember events, or to suggest clearer wording. Even so, his eyes began hooding over with drowsiness.

“Hey, Scott?” Amado appeared by his desk. He was always pale from too many daylight hours spent in the basement of the station tending the computer networks, but now his face seemed drawn with tension.

Huang ran his hand across his face, trying to wake up. “What’s up?”

Amado said, “I’d really like to talk to you about what happened when Metta was taken.”

“Sure.” He waited for Amado to continue.

“C’mon, let’s grab a beer and talk.”

Huang shook his head. “Not tonight, sorry. Mountain of paperwork.”

“It would mean a lot to me. I’m worried about her.”

Which “her”—the one missing or the one watching Huang now? Huang worried about both. “That’s understandable. What do you want to know?”

“Ah. I don’t want to hang around here. Let’s go out.”

Huang looked down at the watch in the corner of his desk. Unless he called and said work was keeping him late, his mother would expect him home in an hour.

Giving her one more thing to worry about was not high on his list of priorities. On the other hand, Amado was being awfully insistent on talking, and seemed set against going into anything in the building. If he were an informant, Huang would think he had a piece of information he didn’t trust to the system. But in this case, the system was Metta, and—what if he didn’t trust Metta for some reason?

Metta would have to record anything they talked about, even if she didn’t want to. Unless they went off duty and left the building . . . “Sure. Yeah. Want to hit Wacky Joe’s? Just give me a few minutes to wrap this up.”

Amado fidgeted by his desk. “Yeah . . . sure. I’ll meet you there.”

Huang agreed and watched Amado walk out of the room. The moment the door shut behind him, Metta said, “Did he seem tense to you?”

“Yeah . . . Can you think of anything he’d want to hide?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I can’t.”

Huang could. He could think of a very good reason for Amado to be worried about the circumstances around Metta’s abduction.

He groaned and looked at the clock. “I do need to get home to Ma though.” He took his VR glasses out of his pocket and put them in his desk drawer.

“Scott?” She chewed her lower lip. “Will you take me home with you?”

He stopped with his hand to his earbud. “What’s wrong?”

“I’d feel better if I came with you.” She looked away. “You’ll probably have to report this, but I’m afraid of my backup tonight and I want to be around someone who was with me at the last one. I’m afraid I won’t remember today.” She looked back at him. “I want one night of continuity. That’s all.”

He couldn’t help noticing that she hadn’t asked for the favor until after Amado had left. “We aren’t supposed to take the mobile interface equipment out, unless we’re on duty.”

“ ‘It ain’t no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don’t break any.’ ”

“I’m going to have to take the Mae West database away from you.”

She blushed again. “I like her, she was a witty woman. No one else plays with me like this.” Metta looked at him as if she were going to say something more, then shook her head. “So, will you take me with you?”

He could set up an early interview tomorrow if anyone asked him justify tonight. He picked up her VR glasses and tucked them in his pocket. “Sure, Metta. Anything for you.”

The interior of Wacky Joe’s was clouded with smoke. It was stage smoke, meant to give it the feel of a dive bar from the last century, but it had the side effect of making the space very intimate. Amado had a booth to the side of the bar and already had a Negroni in front of him.

Huang ordered a single malt, Oban, neat, and settled across from Amado. “What’s up?”

Amado shrugged and spun his drink on the table. “I just wanted to know what you saw. Morbid, right?”

“Not much. She used the surveillance camera to show me a view of her room, it was only up for a couple of seconds.” He took a sip of the Oban. “You’ve got to be a better witness, since you actually saw them live.”

Shaking his head, Amado said, “I only saw two. Wearing all black, with ski masks.” His fingers drummed against the stem of his glass as if they were hungry for a manual interface. “You saw three, right?”

“Right.”

“The other one must have been behind—” Amado cocked his head and looked at the pocket of Huang’s jacket. “Is that a set of VR glasses?”

“Huh? Yeah. I’ve got an early call tomorrow.”

Amado frowned. “Dude, you aren’t supposed to have those out after hours.”

“This isn’t unusual.”

Amado held up his hands and pushed back from the table. “I’m not getting mixed up in it.”

Huang felt his face hold its last expression, mild interest, while his brain raced behind its mask. Something was not right. “Mixed up in what? I told you we have an early call tomorrow so I’m going straight there from home.”

“She can see on those. I—” He shook his head. “Never mind. This was stupid anyway. I can read your reports, right? Thanks for coming. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Amado—” Huang broke off as Amado slipped out of the booth and dropped cash on the table. He walked quickly, but took a meandering path out of the bar.

The path took him through the blindspots of the bar’s cameras. Huang grimaced. This did not look good.

Huang woke early the next morning to the sound of murmuring voices. Wrapping his robe around himself, he wandered down the hall to the living room. His mother was seated at the desktop in conversation with Metta. The resolution was not as clean as at work, but did little to diminish the soft beauty of the Chinese woman floating over the desktop.

They both stopped talking when he walked into the room. Metta turned partially toward him, but he stood outside the range of the single camera on the desktop.

“How long have you two been up?”

His mother smiled. “I don’t need much sleep and Metta has been kind enough to keep me company.”

How much trouble was he going to get into at work over this? “She’s supposed to be on duty, Ma.”

In flawless Mandarin, Metta said, “I am on duty, Scott. But I’m also allowed to converse with civilians about non-police matters. Your honored mother has been very gracious to invite me in.”

He swallowed and walked around to the front of the camera. Was there any reason she couldn’t make a social call? “Then I’m sorry I never invited you to visit before.”

His mother looked at him and tsked. “This is why you have no friends.” She stood up. “You. Go get dressed, not good to look like this.” She gestured at his bathrobe. “Have guest in house. Show respect.” She looked back at Metta and smiled, “Besides, we still have much to talk about.”

Huang chuckled and headed for the bathroom. He paused in the doorway and looked back at his mother. She was having an animated conversation in Mandarin with Metta.

His mother had been so active before she’d broken her hip, and now the injury trapped her in his apartment away from her friends. He shook his head, watching her laugh at something Metta said. He needed to start calling home during the day more often.

In the steaming water of the shower, Huang tried to organize his thoughts. He turned his active cases over in his head. The Patterson was the most pressing. They needed to find Yates and no one had turned up anything about him. The man was completely off the grid.

Of the evidence remaining, they had the manner of death and Patterson’s appointment with Chase. He needed to ask Metta to follow up on the provenance of the china the table had been set with. See if that led anywhere. It was such a strange murder.

He got out of the shower and toweled himself dry. With the water off, he could hear the murmur of his mother’s conversation with Metta. Maybe meeting Metta would quiet some of his mother’s fears, knowing that he had someone watching his back while he was on duty.

As he rooted through his closet for a clean shirt, he brushed past the formal Chinese silk suit his mother had given him several years ago. He had only worn it once or twice, to please her. He had felt like an imposter, wearing it when he had grown up so far from China. Even though his mother had taught him how to behave, and had ensured he was bilingual—“a great advantage in this economy”—he’d never completely felt like it was his culture. Was that anything like how Metta felt when she modified her interface for people? She was out there pretending to be Chinese to make his mother more comfortable. For him she aped the great starlets of the silver screen. For Delarosa she was a quiet, efficient secretary.

As he walked back to the living room, Metta stopped speaking and whispered something. His mother laughed. Rounding the corner, he saw his mother sitting demurely in front of the interface, smiling innocently at him.

He raised his eyebrows at this picture of decorum. “What?”

“Nothing. We have good talk.”

The two women smiled at him, and Huang couldn’t help feeling like he was outnumbered.

As soon as Huang shut the apartment door behind him, he put the VR glasses on and slid the ear bud into his ear. He looked at Metta to ask her what she’d been talking about with his mother and saw that she had her standard neutral interface again. “So you’re not Chinese now?”

“Do you want me to be?”

“No. I want you to be yourself.”

She blinked. “You mean this interface?”

“No. I mean . . . ” What did he mean? “I mean I want you to be who you want to be, not pick an appearance to accommodate me or my mother.”

“Scott, picking the right face for me is like picking the right tie for you. It affects how people view me, but it isn’t me.” She sighed. “I have emotions, I feel, but I’m not human, so asking me to ‘look like myself’ is a pointless request.”

“I know.”

“Why is this suddenly bothering you?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged and walked down the hall. “I guess because you’ve never come over before. I don’t see you off-duty often.”

“Look at me.”

Huang shifted his gaze to where she floated in his glasses. Her cheeks were pale, and a thin line furrowed her brow. “I like the fact you don’t insist on the same interface every day. It’s like wearing a uniform. Looking like a Chinese woman to meet your mother seemed like dressing up to me. I just picked the most appropriate clothes.”

“And downloaded Mandarin Chinese?”

Her face colored. “Ah. Actually, I did that a while ago. I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t give me unpleasant translation issues. Did I sound all right?”

“Like a native.” He grinned. “It’s better than mine.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“No, really. We moved here when I was little, so my Chinese still sounds like I’m a child.”

“Maybe that’s why your mother treats you like a little boy.”

“Ha!” He rubbed the back of his neck. She might have something there. “What case were you working on, that you needed Chinese?”

She took a breath and hesitated.

Huang watched her, fascinated. Metta didn’t need to breathe, but she used breath to indicate her emotions. Was it conscious, or an algorithm working below her conscious thought?

When she spoke again, she said, “One of my detectives is ethnic Chinese. It seemed polite to know the language.”

Huang stopped in the hallway and stared at her. “You’ve known Chinese since we started working together and you’ve never mentioned it?”

“You never speak it at work. I haven’t needed to use it till now.”

He ran his hand through his hair and started walking again. “So . . . is there anything else, I mean, do you learn languages for anyone else?”

“I learned Icelandic for Sigmundson.” She smiled, and her face softened. “I recite sagas while he’s setting up his equipment.”

They reached the closest MAX station and Huang clattered down the stairs to the platform.

“What’s first today?” Metta asked.

“I’m back to thinking about motive. Who inherits the Patterson estate?”

“His sixteen-year-old son, but through a trust that Mrs. Patterson controls.”

“Any idea what building he wanted to acquire next?”

“Give me a minute and I’ll let you know.”

Something nagged at Huang, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. To distract himself, hoping the thought would spring into focus, he asked, “Did you have another backup at three A.M.?”

Metta nodded.

“How’d it go?”

“Fine. I remember everything since I woke up yesterday.”

“That’s good.”

She shrugged. “The backup wasn’t the problem, it’s the fact that I am a backup. Instead of unbroken memory, I have a gap, so I feel like I’ll shut down at the end of a backup.” She tilted her head, “Think of it like a bad food experience. Even though you know it was a one-time thing your body still gets upset if you think about eating the same food again.”

“Yeah. I’ve never gotten over my childhood carrot experience.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Do tell.”

“Carrot casserole in reverse. You can do the mental image yourself.”

“The only carrots that interest me are the number of carats in a diamond.”

“Does Mae West have an appropriate comment for every situation?”

“Not quite.” She cocked her head. “I’m making a note you don’t like carrots. I didn’t know that.”

“I clearly don’t take you to dinner often enough.”

“You’ve never taken me to dinner. And I have the answer to your last question.”

Huang blinked, trying to remember what he had asked her. Right. The last acquisition Patterson had been making. “Which is?”

“The old Salvation Army Building, which is—huh. That’s the building Yates was working on behind the Daily Grind.” Her eyes narrowed in thought. “Chase owns it now.”

Huang whistled. “Well, well . . . isn’t that interesting. Now that’s a nice connection, and it gives Patterson a motive for wanting Chase out of the picture, but not the other way around.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but Chase was happy to sell. Patterson met the offer on the table and the sale was moving forward.”

“Why do all my avenues turn to dead ends?”

“I could search my databases for days and not have an answer to that one.”

Huang boarded the MAX car as it pulled into the station. “Oh. Any word on the provenance of the china the table was set with?”

“I think you’ll like this. The china on the roof was Mont Clair, by Lennox, and Chase’s teacup was the same.”

“Oooh . . . I do like that.” He chewed the inside of his lip.

“I’ll ask for a warrant to search Chase’s to—”

Metta vanished from his view. Huang’s heart raced. “Metta?”

Seconds of silence ticked by. Cursing, Huang pressed his hand against the glass as if he could hurry the MAX to the next station. Outside, a squad car dopplered past on its way to HQ.

“—see if she’s missing any pieces.”

Huang nearly dropped to his knees with relief as Metta finished her sentence where she had left off. She had replaced her neutral face with Mae West again, but in full color and three-D.

Not caring that he looked like a madman, Huang said aloud, “What the hell was that?”

“What?” A line creased her brow.

“You went away for a minute and then you came back.”

“No, I . . . ” Her face paled. “Oh. Something is very wrong.”

His heart pounded. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure. I feel strange.”

Huang reached out, as if his hand could touch the face floating in his vision. He caught sight of his watch. 9:01. His breath stopped in his chest. “Did you just do a backup?”

Her luminous eyes turned to him. Had the real Mae West’s eyes ever been that blue? “Yes.”

“Did you go down across the board, or just with me?”

“System wide. Scott?” She licked her lips. “What do I look like?”

The air seemed to stifle him. “Mae West. Colorized. 3-D.”

She pulled in a deep breath and looked away from him. “I need you to come into the station.”

Huang felt like cold water was dumped down his spine. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head. During the ride to the station, she wouldn’t answer his questions, but floated, practically mute, in the corner of his vision as if she had pressed as far to the side of the VR glasses as she could.

When the MAX pulled into the station, Metta raised her eyes, still not meeting his. “Report to the chief. I’ll see you there.”

She winked out of sight as he ran up the steps, but her surveillance cameras watched him. What had happened?

As he crossed the threshold of the station, Banks careened down the hall toward him. “Huang! In my office, now.” The chief turned on his heel.

Huang had to jog to catch up with him, heart pounding. As he passed through the station, he caught a glimpse of an officer, talking to Mae West. Further on, he saw another officer, with the same Mae West interface for Metta.

Huang stopped and leaned through a department door. Over every desktop interface, Mae West floated in full living color.

As Huang stared at the matched heads, they turned, not quite in unison, in his direction. Banks came back and stood so close his breath steamed hot against Huang’s cheek. “Move it.”

Huang jumped and followed the chief down the hall. “What happened to her?”

“That’s why you’re here.”

Inside the office, Amado, Delarosa and Metta waited for Huang. Metta, who still looked like Mae West, wouldn’t meet his gaze. She somehow made the jaded face seem vulnerable and uncertain.

Banks pointed to a chair flanked by Delarosa and Amado. “Sit.” He flung himself into the seat behind his desk. The wood creaked as he leaned forward to glower at Huang.

Huang sank into the chair, glancing at the others. Amado wore VR glasses and his lips twitched as he subvocalized. Delarosa tapped a pencil on a pad of paper, his mouth a tight, compressed line.

Huang held his questions. He wouldn’t be the one who drove this discussion. Resting his hands on his knees, he ran scales in his mind and focused on his breathing.

Amado shifted once and Banks shook his head. Huang waited, with a bead of sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

He almost flinched when Delarosa finally spoke. “Where were you at three A.M. this morning?”

“Asleep. At home.”

“Who was with you?”

“I sleep alone.”

“Is there anyone who can verify you were there?”

“My mother was home.” He looked at Metta. “So was Metta.”

Amado leaned forward again, but Banks held a finger up to stop him.

Delarosa scribbled something on his pad. “Why did you take the interface equipment home last night?”

Huang turned slightly in his chair to face Delarosa, wondering what Amado had told him. “I had an early call and she asked me to.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Why would she do that?”

Huang hesitated.

“It’s all right, Huang.” Metta raised her eyes and turned to Delarosa. “I was afraid; I suggested we schedule an early morning call so he had a reasonable justification for taking the equipment out.”

Amado asked, “What were you afraid of?”

She shrugged the ample bosom of Mae West. “I guess you could say I was afraid of the dark.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Delarosa scowled. “You’re a computer with thousands of cameras. It’s never dark.”

Fixing him with her gaze, she said, “I’m designed to have continuous consciousness. I don’t sleep. Ever. But, after the assailants took Metta Prime, Amado restarted me from a backup. The practical side effect of that is, from my perspective, I lost consciousness for over twenty-four hours. Imagine something routine in your life, like brushing your teeth. Nothing bad has ever happened; you barely think about it except as part of your routine. How would you feel if you blacked out while brushing your teeth?” She tilted her head to the side. “Wouldn’t you have some hesitation about the toothbrush, even though you knew it had nothing to do with what had happened to you?”

Delarosa shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “You were kidnapped, it’s understandable—”

“I wasn’t.” Metta glared at him. “It’s important you understand that. I—the one you are talking to—was not kidnapped; I have no trauma or even memory of the event. What upsets me is the memory loss, and that’s the only thing I have experienced.” She turned to Huang. “That’s why I asked them to bring you in.”

He blinked, trying to make sense of what she was saying. “I don’t understand.”

“Someone, probably Metta Prime, sent me a Trojan horse that contained this.”

Amado said, “We still don’t know that. The crash might be related to the new chassis. I don’t see any signs of tampering with your code.”

She gestured to her face. “I crashed and I can’t manifest any other interface. What do you call that?”

Huang went still. “And you think it happened at my house last night?”

Metta looked away. “It’s a possibility.”

“Was I the only officer you went home with last night?”

“No—”

“Stop it.” Delarosa leaned forward and jabbed his pencil at Huang. “You’re here to answer questions, not ask them.”

Huang ran his hand through his hair. “So ask.”

Delarosa frowned. “According to Metta’s bandwidth reports, she maintained an active connection to your house all night. What did you have her working on?”

“Why aren’t you asking her this? I was asleep.”

“Answer me.”

“I don’t know. My mother sometimes wakes up during the night, maybe she was talking with Metta.”

Delarosa wrote something down on his note pad.

“No.” Huang raised his hands and looked at the chief. “You can’t bring my mother in. Please.”

Banks stared at Huang impassively.

Huang looked to Metta for help. “C’mon, you know my mother had nothing to do with this. What about at Chase’s apartment? You logged in there.”

Amado cleared his throat. “I thought about that, but it seems like it’s related to backing up, so the last backup is a more reasonable entry point. Besides . . . ” His voice trailed away and he looked at Delarosa nervously.

Delarosa’s mouth turned down at the corners. “Go ahead and spill everything.”

Huang knew what Amado had been about to say. “Besides, Mae West is an interface Metta created for me.”

She nodded. “Did Metta Prime colorize the West interface during the dark period?”

Huang shook his head. “The mono-v face you had on yesterday is the one I last saw you—her wearing.”

Banks leaned back in the chair. “So the question is . . . if Metta Prime is trying to send a message, what does Mae West have to do with anything?”

Huang inhaled and held the breath while he thought. “Is it possible her kidnapping is related to the case I was working on when she was taken?”

“Tell us more about that.” Delarosa lifted his pad of paper and poised his pencil over it.

Amado shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, the Mae West thing, maybe, but not today’s crash.”

Metta shook her head. “Not necessarily. My Prime might be dealing with an invasive virus.” She stopped and sighed. “For that matter, we don’t know how deeply I might be infected.”

“Don’t you have firewalls and stuff?” Huang asked.

“I have subroutines, which handle basic things, but a signature from Metta Prime would look the same as a signature from me.” Metta paused. “I think we should consider replacing me.”

“Metta!” Amado nearly jumped out of his seat. “I can run any tests you want. You don’t need to do that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Amado, you’re a dear, but you’re out of your depth.”

He sputtered, “I’ve been taking care of you for years.”

“No. You’ve been taking care of Metta Prime for years. As soon as you booted me from the backup, I diverged from her. I mean, let’s be realistic here . . . Do you know any AI who’s a backup?”

Banks looked sharply at Amado. “I thought you said this was a procedure that had been done before.”

Amado ran his hands through his hair and looked at the floor. “AIs have been revived from backup before.”

“But not while the Prime was living.” Metta glared at him. “I should not be here. But for the moment I am, so let’s make use of that, shall we?” She turned to Delarosa. “I think it’s likely the Patterson case is in some way connected, or Metta Prime would have fixed on a different interface.”

“Can we even trust your judgments? You said you were infected with a virus.”

Amado said, “I ran a scan on her right after her crash, I don’t see anything wrong besides her interface.”

“And here I thought I looked pretty.” She turned the corners of her mouth down. “Chief. Please, we only have five hours until my next backup. I’m as certain as I can be; Huang saw something during my dark period related to this case. It will be something not in his reports, because it didn’t seem important. I want him and Delarosa to compare notes and work these cases together.”

Banks glared at Metta. His jaw worked subtly as he subvocalized to her. Finally, the chief nodded and turned to Delarosa. “Huang’s working with you on this. Metta is right. There must be something that happened, between her Prime’s last backup and when she was taken, that Huang knows. So I want you two to work together on her disappearance and the Patterson murder.”

Delarosa opened his mouth, scowling.

Banks held up his hand. “I mean it.”

“Fine.” Delarosa drew a hard line through something on his pad.

“Now get out of here.” Banks pointed at the door.

Huang followed Delarosa to his desk, head reeling from the last half hour. Metta waited for them, floating in perfect imitation of Mae West over Delarosa’s desktop interface.

“Here.” Delarosa sat down and tossed him a file folder of hard copies. “Yours are electronic, aren’t they?”

Huang nodded. “I’ll key them over to your desktop.”

Metta said, “Delarosa prefers hard copies so I’m printing transcripts of everything we’ve talked about today.”

“That’ll kill a lot of trees.”

Delarosa glowered. “Here’s the deal. I don’t make comments on your preferences. You don’t make them on mine. Fair?”

“Fair. Thanks.” He sat down and started leafing through the papers Delarosa had handed him.

Huang got frustrated reading Delarosa’s reports, because he seemed to be ignoring a whole line of questioning about how Metta worked, and what that might have to do with the case. His notes were terse almost to the point of incomprehensibility.

During Metta’s abduction, three armed men had entered the building without being seen. Amado saw two in a corridor, but was unable to identify them. In fact, the clearest description of the men was the one Huang had provided.

Although an inside job was possible, the men had also disabled cameras all along the route out of the building. This suggested a highly organized plan carried out by several people who knew the system very well. Better, in fact, than any of the officers currently working at the station. The only one with sufficient knowledge was Amado, but he was among those injured in the attack. “Metta? I don’t see it in Delarosa’s report; did you do a size analysis of the men I reported seeing?”

“It was inconclusive.”

“Would you humor me? Make blank composites and compare that against people in the department who could have been in the station at the time of your Prime’s abduction.”

“I’ve run profiles on everyone in the station, no one has the know-how to trick my cameras.”

“Except Amado.”

She sighed. “Except Amado. Huang, even if I didn’t know him well, he has no motive. It’s most likely to be an outside job.”

“Will you show me the groups anyway?”

“Yes.” On his VR glasses, three men’s silhouettes appeared in blue. “These are the weights and heights you reported. Of the people who could have been at the station, these are the ones who fit that body type.” A short list of names scrolled past his eyes.

“Why are you so resistant to this?”

She pulled her mouth into a straight line. “Look at the names. Fitzgerald and Amado are on that list. I have one eyewitness, you, who didn’t see anything long enough to make a positive ID. It’s extremely unreliable testimony.”

“Fine.” He let the air out of his lungs, staring at Delarosa’s report.

“It’s a good idea, but I’ve already gone down that path.”

Huang closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “Why me? If it’s related to the Patterson case, why not Griggs?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay . . . let’s go at this from the other end. Why Diamond Lil? Why not—” Huang broke off, his mouth open. He suddenly remembered the plot of the movie.

Metta stared at him. “Why is your pulse spiking?”

“This is crazy, I know, but on Tuesday when you showed me Diamond Lil you said you watched the movie. Do you remember the plot?”

Her eyes shifted to the left. “Lady Lou (Mae West) works in the 1890s saloon of Gus Jordan (Noah Beery, Sr.). Gus traffics in white slavery and runs a counterfeiting ring. Next door to the bar is a city mission . . . ” Her gaze widened and snapped back to Huang. “The old Salvation Army building—you think they have my Prime there.”

“Who owns it?”

She nodded slowly. “Magdalena Chase.”

“And Patterson wanted to buy it. And the witness to the murder was working there. There’s got to be a connection. Get me a warrant to search that building.”

“I’ve sent the request in, but it’s a line of conjecture. I don’t know that I can get you one.”

“I need to talk to Delarosa.” He hurried across the room and stopped by the older detective’s desk.

Delarosa looked up, glaring. “What?”

Huang quickly related his conversation with Metta about the film. When he finished Delarosa snorted heavily. “That’s pretty thin.”

“I know, but there has to be some reason she settled on Diamond Lil. I don’t understand the link, but there has to be a connection.”

“I think you’re reading too much into this.” Delarosa slid a page across the table. “The fact that both crimes used a .38 is the more likely link. We need to focus on finding the murder weapon.”

“Fine. When the warrant comes in, I’ll check it out without you.” Huang stalked back to his desk and grabbed his coat. He couldn’t search the place, but he could damn well keep an eye on it.

Huang leaned against the wall and nursed the cup of coffee he’d picked up at the Daily Grind. According to the counter girl, Joe Yates had not been in for his usual lowfat double-shot latte that morning. It was nearly three o’clock, so it was unlikely that Yates would show at all. Huang stared at the old Salvation Army building across the street. “So . . . I’m thinking that maybe whoever killed Patterson took your Prime to cover up the crime. And they’re looking for or have already found Yates.”

Metta frowned. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just make it look like an accident in the first place? Or make sure we never found the body?”

“Maybe Yates surprised them and they weren’t expecting to be caught.”

“Possible. We won’t know until we find him.”

Huang took another sip of his coffee. “Any word on the warrant?”

“How many times are you going to ask me?” Metta shook her head. “I’ll let you know when I have it. Look, there’s a traffic camera at the end of this street so I can keep an eye on the area while we do something useful.”

“I don’t mind waiting.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I know. But I want to see the Patterson scene since I—”

“Since you blacked out while you were there.” Huang turned and walked back to the Daily Grind building.

“Exactly. I’m hoping that something will tell me what’s in that missing memory.”

The lobby of the Daily Grind looked the way he remembered it, with potted plants hiding in the corners. Huang headed for the stairs.

“Oh, hang on.” Metta stopped him. “The elevator is working today.”

“Thank god. I was not looking forward to climbing those stairs again.” Huang wheeled around and pushed the elevator button.

“Wimp.”

“I’m going to go to the gym.” He watched the numbers descend to meet him. “Really.”

“A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald, but if he has fire, women will like him.”

“Hey!” He ran a hand through his hair, checking.

Metta laughed, “It’s a Mae West quote. Honestly, Scott.”

Sheepish, he jerked his hand out of his hair. “I knew that.” Huang got into the elevator and reached for the roof button.

“Scott, will you start in the hallway upstairs?”

“Sure.” He pressed the button for the tenth floor and they rode the elevator in silence. When the door opened, he stepped out into the soft glow of the wood wainscoting. “Remember this?”

Metta shivered. “I don’t like this place.”

“Are you okay?”

“My memory ends here.”

He had not thought this all the way through. What if he caused her to crash? “We can go back.”

“No.” Mae West’s eyes glittered dangerously. “I need to know what things I’m missing.”

The hall seemed longer than it had before. When he climbed the stairs to the landing, the lemon scent was completely gone. “There was a strong lemon odor here, as though someone had cleaned recently.”

“Will you give me a new three-sixty?”

Huang spun on his heels obediently. Then he stood and turned slowly, letting Metta see the whole room.

“All right. Let’s go to the roof.”

Outside Huang walked across the grass roof to the wireframe table. He showed her where the wheelchair had been and the spot where he’d found the screw and the stained grass.

“Scott?” Metta looked at him with wide, serious eyes out of keeping with Mae West’s face. “May I ask you to do something morbid?”

He stopped in the middle of the roof. “What is it?”

“Will you replay what you did when I—when they took the original me, my Prime? So I can, so I can pretend I remember it.”

His breath seemed locked in his throat. He glanced at the time. 2:55. “Are you sure? Your backup . . . ”

“That’s why. Please?”

He swallowed heavily and whispered. “I can do that.”

He walked back toward the center and gestured at it with his hand so she could see. “Griggs was here, fingerprinting the wheelchair.”

He tried to remember, not wanting to. “I had just asked you why the elevator was down.”

She broke in. “Just act it out. I know it’s weird, but I have never felt lost like this. I just want to fill in the blanks.”

He swallowed against the lump in his throat. “Metta?” he subvocalized, “How long has the elevator in this building been down?”

He waited for a moment, not looking at her. “Then you said you’d been trying to check on that since we got here, but couldn’t reach the building manager. Then you froze, and you said—”

Metta whispered, “Shots fired.” Her voice was an imagined memory. “Officer down.”

Huang froze, as if he were listening for gunfire in their vicinity again. He pointed to where Griggs had been. “Griggs stood up and yelled your name.”

Metta nodded, the color fading from her rouged cheeks until it looked as though she would return to black and white. She whispered, “Three armed subjects in chassis room. The assailants are armed, I repeat—Amado! Two officers down.”

As he remembered, Huang turned on his heel and sprinted back across the roof. “Metta, can you give a visual?” The memory of fear grabbed him again. “Metta, answer me. Who’s there? Can you give a visual?”

Still running he said, “You showed me an image, but it was fast. You screamed and froze, then you vanished.” He put his hand on the door. “There was only silence after that.”

“Thank you.” The husky voice she affected as Mae West seemed thick with emotion. “I’d like to go down now.”

He walked across the grass roof, shooting glances at her as he went. Cars hummed by on the interstate and a breeze kicked a dried leaf across his path. Huang pulled open the door of the roof access and stepped onto the small landing containing the elevator. His heels clicked on the linoleum.

Metta looked up and heaved a sigh of relief and beamed. “In a happy turn of events . . . I just found a judge to give you a warrant.”

“Great. Can you get me some backup. I mean—You know.”

“It’s not a dirty word, Scott. And yes. I have people on the way.”

“Did you tell Delarosa we’ve got it?”

“He’s headed to Patterson’s office.”

It figured he wouldn’t be interested. “There’s not a chance Patterson’s office is in the old Salvation Army building, is there?”

Metta shook her head. “I’d have mentioned it—”

Her image froze, flickered and vanished.

Huang gasped. He didn’t need the clock to tell him it was 3:00. What if she didn’t come back this time?

“—if it were.” Her face paled. “It happened again, didn’t it?”

She still looked like Mae West. The grand dame of silver screen stared back at Huang, in full color, but with a layer of fear he had never seen.

“It was a minute, like last time.”

She closed her eyes. “Damn.”

“What’s different this time?”

Her eyes flashed open. “Nothing I can tell. I still look like the finest gal that ever walked the streets.”

“That you do, sweetheart.” He crumpled his coffee cup and threw it into the garbage can by the elevator. “What’s the ETA?”

“First car should be just a block away.”

“Great.” Huang pushed the down button. “Will you tell them to guard the exits on the north side?”

“Will do. I’ll get a perimeter established with first responders and then send you a team to search the building.”

The door dinged open and Huang stepped inside. He stood still so the door almost caught his coat as it slid shut.

“I’ll be damned. It’s that lemon smell again.”

“Help me out, Scott.” Metta watched him carefully. “How common is this scent you’re talking about?”

“It’s fairly common in cleaning products, but I don’t usually smell it in concentrations unless someone has just cleaned.” A picture of his mother scrubbing the furniture flashed through his mind. “It’s strange that it wasn’t here before.” He snorted. “And it’s strong.”

He spun in a circle in the tiny elevator. A chair from the lobby stood in the corner. Huang tilted his head back to look at the access hatch. It was not seated neatly in its frame. He climbed onto the chair and subvocalized, “Metta, can you find out why the elevator was out of service on Tuesday?”

“I’m working on it, but the manager says he never knew it was out of order, and never put in a service call to get it fixed.”

He reached up and pushed on the access panel. It rose easily, letting in a stronger draft of the lemony fragrance. Without needing to be asked, Huang pulled off Metta’s eSpy and lifted the small lens into the space above the elevator. He turned it slowly as Metta played the images on his glasses. A bundle of clothing lay close to the edge of the hatch. They were dark gray and splotched with blood. The corner of a name badge showed the letters “Yat.”

Huang stifled a curse and turned the small camera further. A hand flashed across his vision and grabbed Huang’s forearm, pinning it to the edge of the access hatch.

Metta’s eSpy dropped out of his hand and bounced across the roof of the elevator, flashing vertiginous images on his glasses. He jerked his hand free as the eSpy fell over the edge of the elevator. He almost fell as the image spun out of control until Metta cut the feed to his glasses.

Huang jumped off the chair and pulled his gun out, aiming at the opening.

Metta whispered, “Backup is on the way.”

“Mr. Yates!” He shouted upward. “We just want to ask you a few questions.”

He could hear murmuring above.

Metta turned up the gain in his earbud so he could hear the fluid voice. She whispered, “I think that’s Rwandan.”

“What’s he saying”

“I’m downloading a translator, it will be a minute.”

Raising his voice again, Huang said, “Mr. Yates. You have to come down sometime. Let’s make it easy and come quietly now.”

He could hear a rustle of fabric. A hoarse voice spoke out of the darkness. “You won’t shoot me?”

“No, sir.” He held the gun aimed at the hole. “But I need you to come down.”

“You’ve got a gun pointing at me.”

“Yes sir, I do. I won’t use it unless you give me a reason to. You won’t do that, will you?”

“Maybe you think I already have.”

“I don’t think anything yet, except you’re trapped and scared. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want you to come down.”

There was a long silence and more murmuring prayers. “All right.” The ceiling creaked as he slid closer to the opening. “I’m coming down.”

“The chair’s right beneath the opening.”

A slender leg appeared in navy blue sweat pants. Another appeared and Yates quickly lowered himself to the chair. The track suit he wore was rumpled as if he’d slept in it. His right hand had been crudely bandaged with what looked like a linen napkin.

“I’m going to check for weapons.” Huang pushed him against the wall a little harder than necessary to remind Yates that grabbing an officer was never acceptable. Yates stood listlessly while Huang patted him down, almost as if he had fallen asleep standing up. Nothing. It would have been easier if he were packing a .38.

“He’s clean.” Huang told Metta. He hit the button for the lobby. “Mr. Yates, we’re going to take you downtown to ask you some questions.”

Yates nodded his head miserably. “I know. I was trying to help and then . . . ” He waved his bandaged hand helplessly, “it all went wrong.”

Huang shared a look with Metta. Went wrong? “What went wrong?”

Yates rubbed his long slender fingers over his short hair. “It’s complicated.”

Metta whispered, “I translated his prayer. He was asking why he was being punished for trying to help a dying man.”

Huang led Yates off the elevator, still subvocalizeing to Metta. “That could still mean he killed Patterson.”

“True. There are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin.” Metta shook her head and grimaced. “What about the warrant for the old Salvation Army building?”

Huang squeezed his eyes shut, weighing his options. “Can one of the uniforms take Yates downtown?”

“I’ll have someone meet you at the door and I’ll get Griggs to collect the clothes from the elevator.”

Huang spied the open door to the Daily Grind. “Have them meet me in the coffee shop. Mr. Yates hasn’t had his lowfat double-shot latte today.”

“You are such a softy.”

“I know.” He grinned. “That’s why you like me.”

It took another fifteen minutes to transfer Yates. Huang strapped on his flak jacket and headed inside the Salvation Army building with a small team.

“Okay boys, subvocalize from here on.” Metta’s voice was neutral and indicated that she was addressing all of the officers present. She guided them through the building, clearing each room as they went before leading them up to the next floor. For the most part, the building was empty and waiting for renovation. One room showed signs of a squatter, but the rest had the standard discards of old offices—partition walls, old file folders, and layers of dust. On the fourth floor, Metta narrowed her eyes and highlighted tracks in the carpet that looked as though someone had dragged a heavy handtruck down the hall recently. The tracks led back to a door three-quarters of the way down the hall.

Huang pulled out his gun and sidled down the hall. The other officers positioned themselves ready to cover him.

The door was ajar about an inch. Metta said, “I don’t hear anything inside.”

Huang took a breath and knocked on the door. “Police. Open up.”

Silence.

He pushed the door open.

The room held a desk and a chair. Next to the desk, the carpet contained a rectangular impression as if something heavy had sat on it recently.

“Take a look.” Metta opened a screen in Huang’s VR glasses with an infrared view of the room, using another officer’s eSpies for better resolution. In the artificial colors of the infrared, he could see the faint glow of warmth in the rectangle.

“That’s the right size to be a chassis.” Metta wiped the image from his glasses and reappeared. “The men downstairs are on alert, but I think we’re too late.”

Huang let out the breath he had been holding. “I’m sorry—” He stopped with his mouth open. He sniffed the air.

“Scott, what is it?”

He turned slowly, his nose raised. “Lemon Pledge. It’s fainter than the other times, but still noticeable.”

Metta said, “CSI is on their way. Seal the room, and don’t touch anything.”

They went back into the hall to wait. Huang felt as if he were moving underwater, it took so much effort to even breathe. He subvocalized, “I’m sorry, Metta.”

“Scott.” She looked at him closely. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

“If I had come in when I got the warrant . . . ”

She shook her head. “The heat signature is cooler than that. I’d guess we missed them by about fifteen to twenty minutes.”

Huang glanced at his watch. 3:25. “How long does it take to move you?”

“If you know what you’re doing it’s fast.”

Huang looked at the officers waiting in the hall. “Let’s go ahead and search the whole building. Maybe they didn’t move far.”

“Unlikely.” Metta shifted her eyes up and to the left. “They’ll have another place to store her, but knowing this one means I can start running numbers to see if I can come up with other likely places.”

“The question now is: What tipped them off?”

Metta compressed her lips. “I don’t like the probable answers.”

He helped the team finish sweeping the building, but they found no other obvious evidence of Metta Prime’s presence. As soon as he could turn the scene over to Griggs, he headed back to the station to interview Yates. Metta was silent for much of the ride and almost looked as if she would be happier somewhere else. Her brooding was so dark, Huang finally said, “If you want to tune out, I don’t mind.”

“Hmm? No, I’m fine here.”

“You don’t have to watch me ride the MAX; you’ve got a lot of other things on your mind.”

“I’ve got a lot of mind to deal with things.” She pursed her lips. “Which is part of what I’m thinking about. What happened that all the multi-tasking parts of myself reacted as one.”

“Was it the shock of finding men inside the station?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea how they got in. I could see them evading one camera, but not all of them.”

“What if—” Huang stopped. She would never go for this, but she was looking at him expectantly, so he filled the silence. “When you were talking to Amado, right after you woke up, you mentioned playing hide and seek . . . Do you really?”

“Yes . . . and No, I see where you’re going with this, but it’s not that simple. When we play, I stop monitoring the cameras. The public cameras, like the ones that identify people coming into the building, are still captured and processed, but they go into my unconscious banks. I still scan people, but I don’t pay attention to what I’m doing, so keeping them out is as reflexive as a sneeze. Does that make any sense?”

“So, it’s likely the people who took you were people who belonged in the station. Right?”

“You’re back to thinking it was an inside job.”

Huang got off the MAX and walked up the steps of the station. “Tell me at what point you first scan me.”

He was halfway up the steps, when Metta said, “Now. My first camera just tagged you. But, unless you flag warnings in the A.S., I don’t start paying attention till you cross the threshold, and even then, only if you’re someone I’m looking forward to seeing.”

Huang ignored the people passing him on the steps. “Will you do something for me?”

“I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”

“Then play hide and seek with me.”

“You think Amado was involved.”

Huang wished he could hide from her gaze. He wasn’t sure what he thought. “I wonder if someone knew about your games and took advantage of them.”

“How would they have known?”

“I don’t know.” Unless Amado was involved, which Metta seemed unable to acknowledge as a possibility. “What’s the shortest route to the chassis room?”

She brought a map up on his VR glasses. “Go to the south side of the building and enter through the garage.”

Huang headed around the building. “Did Delarosa do this?”

“He doesn’t know about our hide and seek games.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the case.”

“Metta! How can you think turning your cameras off is unrelated?”

“Because the thieves couldn’t have known or counted on it. The chance of us playing a game at the exact moment they decided to break in is extremely unlikely.”

What if Metta had been tampered with so she couldn’t consider Amado as a suspect?

As he entered the garage, the acrid smell of electricity crackled around him. An evidence truck sat up on blocks, with a mechanic under it. Rows of filing cabinets, filled with parts, lined the walls.

Metta said, “I’d have noticed you when you came through the garage doors.”

Huang nodded and backed up. “Let me know when I’m off the radar.”

About ten feet outside the garage door, Metta said, “Now.”

“All right.” Huang straightened his shoulders. “Show me the route again.”

Metta flashed the map on his VR glasses. “You didn’t ask, but here are the cameras that were disabled.” A row of red dots appeared along the line that she recommended as the fastest route. Two green dots appeared scattered on the route. “These are the officers who went down.”

“How hard is it to disable a camera?”

“Depends. These guys used a wire cutter, so, in theory, they could have cut the cable as they passed underneath.”

“Right. Let’s see how far I can get in a hundred seconds.”

Her face set and resolute, Metta closed her eyes. “Ready? Go.”

Huang started walking. They would have walked, surely, or other officers would have noticed them. As he walked, Metta counted backward, “100, 99, 98, 97 . . . ”

The first camera he passed hung lifeless from the ceiling. Why did they cut the cables, if they were planning on taking Metta’s chassis? Was it so they would have a safe way out if something went wrong? He fought the urge to run down the hall as Metta continued to count. “ . . . 87, 86, 85 . . . ”

The men Amado saw wore masks, and they had worn masks in the image Metta sent Huang. “ . . . 63, 62, 61 . . . ” He rounded the corner and entered the hall where Fitzgerald had been shot.

He reached the end of the hall without seeing other officers. “ . . . 53, 52, 51 . . . ”

He opened the door to the stairs and ran down them. The chances of unexpectedly seeing someone else on the stairs were slim. The suspects could have hurried here. He looked at the spot where Amado had been found. Had they put the masks on in the stairs, or after they shot Fitzgerald?

He opened the door to the hall outside the chassis room. “ . . . 42, 41, 40 . . . ” He heard footsteps at the other end of the hall, and saw Banks walking away from him. Huang swallowed, walking briskly down the hall to the chassis room.

“ . . . 30, 29, 28 . . . ” Huang opened the chassis room door and stepped in. Amado looked up, grinning. He put one finger to his lips. In his ear Metta said, “ . . . 18, 17, 16 . . . ”

Huang crossed the room and put his hand on her chassis. It was warm and smooth to the touch. A faint vibration stirred through his fingertips and the sense of life inside the box made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

“I’m here.”

Her voice stopped counting and the cameras on her chassis snapped into life. Her interface suddenly focused on him, with her face gone pale. “Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.”

“Sorry, sweetheart.”

She looked at his hand resting on her chassis. “Go right ahead. I don’t mind if you get familiar . . . ”

Huang colored and jerked his hand away from her. He turned around to face Amado. “I thought you’d be in your office.”

Metta smiled at him. “I told him what you were trying to do. What was the trip like from your POV?”

“I didn’t see anyone, except for the chief walking away.”

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Metta said. “It seems likely the suspects used that route to get to my chassis room. The fact that they killed Fitzgerald indicates, to me, that they were people whose presence in those corridors was inappropriate. In other words, they thought Fitzgerald would have known from looking at them that they were in the wrong place.”

“You don’t think they were just worried about being recognized?”

She shook her head. “If it were an inside job, they could have relied on being recognizable to avoid suspicion while the crime was in progress. Once they took my Prime, they would have needed to mask themselves on the way out, but not on the way in.”

Huang thought about that. “What if some of them were hired guns and some were insiders?”

“Possible.” She said aloud, then she whispered in Huang’s ear, “You’re still having the same thought, aren’t you?

“Yes,” he subvocalized. Turning to Amado, he said, “Is it possible someone could do something to Metta so she was unable to suspect them of a crime?”

Amado lifted his head. “Are you accusing me?”

“Why would you assume I meant you?”

“Because I’m her wrangler. There isn’t anyone else here who could.”

Huang held up his hands. “Look. I’m just asking questions. Is it possible?”

“Theoretically? Yes. But someone would have to have her exact ID and there’s no way to get that without having the AI in your possession. So you’re back to me again.”

“What about her Prime?”

Amado stopped with his mouth open. “Yeah . . . yeah. But—Shit. Is that possible?”

“What?”

“Well, look. It would only work in a case like this, where there was a living Prime and a backup, because their signature is the same. So what if that was the point?”

Metta shook her head. “No one could have known you would reboot me from a backup. It’s unprecedented.”

“What if they knew Amado would reboot you?”

Metta looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. “Scott. They couldn’t have known Amado would reboot me. Hope? Yes, but it’s more common to get a clean system in if something compromises the original. The backups are just for actual damage. My Prime was stolen, not damaged. “

Huang straightened his shoulders and took a breath. “You’re right, Metta. Of course they couldn’t have been sure.”

Metta scowled in his glasses. “Don’t patronize me, Scott. I can tell you don’t agree with me.”

Huang weighed his options. “Look. You guys know more about this than I do. I was just asking questions, trying to understand.”

“Give a man a free hand and he’ll try to put it all over you.” Metta sighed in a breathy Mae West voice. “Scott, you’ve got Yates upstairs in the interrogation room. We should get up there.”

“Yeah. Thanks for your time, Amado.” As he opened the door, Huang paused. “One more thing. Did you play hide and seek with Metta during her dark period?”

Amado stared at him for a moment. “Are you asking me to answer as a witness or a suspect?”

“I don’t know. I want to find her. Do you?”

Amado pulled back as if Huang had slapped him. “What do you think?”

“Depends. Did you play hide and seek with her?”

Amado looked away from Huang. Metta watched them with her lips parted. The breath escaped from Amado. “Yeah. I’ve been worried about it.”

“Why?”

Amado squirmed in his seat. “You’ll have to tell the chief.”

“Tell him what?”

“I have a webcam in my office. And I keep a blog.” He slid a hand into his hair, twisting the tendrils into gravity-defying forms. “I’ve got Metta’s interface placed so she can’t see either the camera or my PC. I’m careful about keeping identifying details off the blog, but I can’t help wondering if someone used it to time the break-in.”

Blood pounded in Huang’s ears. “And you haven’t gone to the chief about this?”

“I know, I know.” Amado leaned forward in his seat and put his face in his hands. “It’s against so many rules, I’ve been afraid of being fired.”

“Why are you telling me now?”

“I wanted to the other night, but you had her with you and . . . I didn’t. I was scared, but I’m not stupid enough to lie. Besides . . . you care about her, too. To a lot of the guys, she’s a tool, or at best, a pet.”

“Had you discussed rebooting her from a backup with anyone?”

“Huh?” Amado looked up. “I mean, yeah, everyone in the industry talks about it.”

“Anyone specific?”

Amado’s shoulders sagged. “There was a thread of comments on my tagboard about her. I can get you a list of the handles, but it won’t do much good. I don’t require registration, so their profiles will mostly be anonymous.”

“I’d like to read the tagboard anyway. Anyone else?”

“What? Do you want a list of all of my computer friends? For crying out loud, I went to MIT. Everyone I know talks about this.” His jaw dropped as Huang stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I’m not.”

Wrapping his hands in his hair, Amado pulled it straight up and groaned. “Fine.”

“Thanks.” Was there any way to tell if Amado was lying, or if he had made up the blog as a bizarre sort of alibi? The blog made a case for “it could be anybody,” but Huang had trouble buying it. The coincidence seemed too great.

On the other hand, Amado and Metta had been playing hide and seek for ages; someone could have seen the chance and planned for it. His thoughts backed up. How long had they been playing hide and seek? He tried to remember the first time he had seen Amado ducking under surveillance cameras and sneaking into Metta’s blind spots. Was it a standard AI game, or had Amado suggested it?

He made a mental note to do a search to see if other AIs played it. “I’d like to get that list now.”

Amado hesitated. “My office is sort of a mess.”

Huang raised his eyebrows at the same time as Metta cleared her throat. Amado turned red. “Sorry. Yeah. Don’t know what I was thinking. Come on.”

His office hid under piles of cables and random computer parts. The funk of old soy sauce hung in the air. Amado sat down at his desk and shoved a memory stick into his computer. As Huang came around the desk to watch him copy the files, Metta shook her head in dismay. “That little sneak. Look at that.”

“What?” Huang took a step closer, ready to stop Amado from erasing the files.

“The camera. I can’t believe he was doing that.”

The desktop computer chirruped and Amado pulled the stick free. “Here you go.” His arm brushed a can on his desk and it tipped off. The lid came free as it hit the carpet, filling the room with the scent of lemons.

“Bother.” Amado fumbled for the can, hands slipping in the reddish gel.

“What is that?” Huang barely kept the tension out of his voice.

“My degreaser.” He shook his head. “At least things will be oil-free.”

Metta whispered, “What is it, Scott? Your heart rate spiked.”

“The lemon scent. His degreaser smells like that lemon scent.”

Her eyes shifted up and to the left. “It’s a citrus-based degreaser that’s used in the high-tech industry because of its anti-conductivity properties . . . I’m comparing the spectrograph Griggs took in the elevator at the Yates site against the one on the company website to look for similarities.” She frowned. “The chemical signatures of the lemon scent in the elevator at the Yates site and of the citrus degreaser are identical.”

“What about in the Salvation Army building?”

Metta looked up and to the left. “The same.”

Huang forced himself to walk away from Amado. He had to talk to the chief and could only hope that the man waiting in interrogation would have something to say that would tie everything together.

As Scott headed up the stairs to HQ, Metta cleared her throat. “I didn’t want to distract you while you were talking to Amado, but I had a match on Joe Yates’s prints.”

“Oh?” Huang turned down the hall toward interrogation. “Your tone indicates that I’m going to like this.”

“He’s using a fake ID and is actually Josef Ybarra . . . ”

Huang paused at the door. “Why is that name familiar?”

“He was Patterson’s foreman during the scandal about their sub-code work.”

“But his current boss had nothing but good things to say about him.” Huang rubbed his chin, thinking. “If he took the rap for Patterson, that would give him motive.”

“There’s more to it than that. Ybarra was here on a work visa. He lost that when Patterson fired him so he’s in the country illegally now.”

“And we know he was at the scene.”

“So let’s see what he has to say.”

Huang pushed the door to the room open. The overhead lights flattened the interrogation room, washing out all the shadows. The concrete walls had a mirror along one side and cameras in all the corners, giving Metta a clear view of everything in the room.

Ybarra, aka Yates, looked up as Huang entered the room. His hand had been rebandaged with clean gauze and he held it cradled in his lap. Huang subvocalized to Metta, “Any chance that’s a powder burn?”

“Alas, no. It’s a long cut. Fairly ragged. EMT says it looks like he caught it on something and tore the flesh.”

Huang sat on the table, trying to project a casual atmosphere to the cinderblock room. “Mr. Ybarra, do you understand why you are here?”

The man frowned. “That’s not my name.”

“Your fingerprints match those of Josef Ybarra. I don’t think there’s any point in denying who you are.”

He shook his head. “It’s not right. Ask my boss. Look at my ID. I’m Joe Yates.”

“Which is a false identity. I can call you Mr. Yates if you prefer, but you are in our files as Ybarra.”

“It’s not the right name.”

Ignoring the protest, Huang moved on to the next question. “Can you tell me what happened Tuesday? You called 911.”

Ybarra shook himself and straightened up a little. “Makes no sense to pretend. Tuesday, I was up on the scaffolding ’cross the street from the Daily Grind. In the window, I see this reflection of these guys on the roof. They’re having breakfast and I’m thinking, that seems like an awful lot of trouble to go all the way up on the roof. So I’m watching, then the one guy pulls out a gun. So I jump down off the scaffolding and run over, all the way up to help out.”

“You ran toward a man with a gun. Why didn’t you call emergency right away?”

Ybarra hesitated and shrugged. “Didn’t have my phone. Seemed faster to just go there. By the time I got upstairs, the one guy was on the ground and the other guy was gone.”

“Can you describe the other man at all?”

Ybarra shook his head. “It was far away.”

“Anything you noticed would be helpful”

Ybarra closed his eyes; furrows appeared in his forehead. “Short, skinny. Maybe a white man? Wore a black coat and a hat so I didn’t see much. Moved funny.”

“Funny how?”

Shrugging, Ybarra opened his eyes. “I got a cousin with the palsy. Sort of like that.”

“All right. What happened after you got to the roof?”

“I realized he wasn’t breathing. So I called 911.”

“And when you realized it was Patterson? How did that make you feel?”

Ybarra shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Metta whispered, “Electrodermal just shifted dramatically. He’s lying or terrified.

“You were his foreman before he fired you. That must have made you angry.”

“I don’t know the man. He was shot. I tried to help and now you are asking me these questions. Why?”

Huang nodded to his hand. “That’s a pretty nasty cut you’ve got there. How’d that happen?

Ybarra stared at his hand and picked at the gauze. He shrugged. “I cut it on something. Didn’t notice when it happened.”

“Really? You really didn’t notice tearing a gash that big in your hand?” Huang leaned forward on the table, putting one hand down close to Ybarra. “A clean cut I could believe, but that’s a tear. How’d it happen?”

“I told you I don’t remember.”

“But you noticed it on the roof. That was a napkin from the scene that you tied around your hand.”

He shrugged. “I know it happened there. I just didn’t see what cut me.”

Huang chewed the inside of his lip and switched the line of questioning. “What were you doing in the elevator shaft?”

“I had blood all over my clothes and I was afraid someone would ask questions, so I tossed them into the elevator shaft.”

Metta whispered, “Which is possibly what caused the elevator to stop working.”

“But you came back. Why?”

“Didn’t come back.” He worried the tape on his bandage. “Been hiding there. Looks bad, huh?”

“It doesn’t look good. Why did you leave after calling 911?”

“I didn’t think there was anything else I could do.” He huddled in his chair. “I didn’t know I was supposed to wait.”

“Let me suggest something else, Mr. Ybarra.” Huang leaned forward. “Let me suggest that you knew you were here illegally with a fake ID and left so you wouldn’t be caught.”

“It’s not right. I am a legal citizen. My name is Yates.”

Huang studied him and subvocalized to Metta. “What do you think?”

Metta whispered back, “His vitals are showing that he’s distressed.”

Huang subvocalized, “Let’s see if some time in holding sharpens his memory.” He stood up and asked Metta to have a uniform walk Ybarra to a holding cell.

Once Ybarra was out of his hands, Metta cleared her throat. “Well, his motive is clear, he was present, but the means to commit the crime are muddy.”

Huang shook his head. “I know. But why did he set up the tea on the roof? How did he even get Patterson to meet with him? And why would he call 911?”

“Guilty conscience? Maybe he just wanted to talk to him and things got out of hand.” She sighed. “It’s all very tenuous without the murder weapon. I’ll check his banking records to see if there’s a note of him purchasing a gun, ammo, or, heck, even Symphony Rose.”

“Symphony Rose? What’s that?”

“The china pattern of the teacups at the scene.”

“I thought you said it was something different. Something with Mont.”

“That’s Chase’s china. Mont Clair, by Lennox. The china on the roof looks similar but was made by a different manufacturer. It’s Symphony Rose.”

“That’s not what you said before. You said we should see if any pieces were missing.”

“Scott.” She flashed a report on his glasses. “Look. Mont Clair, by Lennox.”

“I know. And you said the crime scene had the same thing. I’m not imagining this. If they were different, you wouldn’t have suggested that we check for missing pieces.”

Metta sighed. “Listen.” In his earbud, he heard the sound of street traffic, and Metta projected the view out his VR glasses from earlier in the day. It was grainier than an eSpy, but a sense of déjà vu gripped Huang nonetheless.

Metta’s recorded voice said, “All right. Let’s keep talking about this.”

“Right.” Huang heard his own voice. He sounded nasally and a little flat.

Metta’s recording continued. “Oh. The china on the roof was Symphony Rose, and Chase has Mont Clair, by Lennox, so I’m afraid that’s a dead end.”

Huang’s mouth dropped. “I swear, Metta, that’s not what I remember you saying.”

“I’ve got the recording, Scott.”

He took a breath to respond and bit it off, feeling sick. She couldn’t tell that she’d been compromised, which meant he needed to figure out what other things were false. “Okay. Yeah. I guess so.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “So, if he bought the china, then that’s a pretty good line against Ybarra. How do you think it’s connected to the break-in?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll print the interview out for Delarosa and see if he has any insights.”

Huang hunched his shoulders, thankful that she couldn’t see his body language. If the record of the china had been changed, what else had? And why that? He ran scales in his head, trying to keep his breathing calm and his heartbeat steady. She couldn’t see his posture, but she could tell how he was reacting.

They already knew that whoever had Metta Prime was using Metta’s blackouts to hack into her. So the facts that they chose to change should point to them. Obviously, they thought the china was important, which made Huang bet that Chase was involved. All he had to do was get the china from evidence, prove that Metta was wrong, and that might be enough to get a warrant to search Chase’s.

What else had been changed? He straightened. Maybe Yates hadn’t been lying about his name. If the fingerprints had been assigned to the wrong man that would explain why he was so insistent about his name and that he wasn’t an illegal. If he was telling the truth and Metta was wrong, was there a way to expose that?

Huang turned on his heel and headed for the evidence room. “We know Ybarra has a connection to the Salvation Army building. Could he be one of the men who broke in here? Or could the skinny man he described be one?”

“It’s hard to say. I’m not saying it isn’t him, only that I can’t tell from the testimony available.”

“So . . . what about this lemon smell?”

Metta rolled her eyes. “I can’t smell it, and I don’t have an analysis of the first odor. Are you certain it’s the same as the degreaser?”

Huang hesitated. “The second one had a metallic overlay, and the last one, the one upstairs was so faint I mostly got a whiff of citrus. Coincidence?”

“Well, the two in the Daily Grind building were both related to the Patterson murder. I don’t know how to tie in the one at the Salvation Army building.” Metta frowned. “Where are you going?”

He pushed open the door to the evidence lab and shrugged. “I wanted to see if Ybarra’s prints were on the china from the Patterson murder site. You don’t have that on record, do you?”

Metta grimaced. “I don’t know for certain. I can’t imagine Griggs skipping that, but they came in during my dark period so my records are spotty.”

“Should I pull them, just in case?”

“You want to see what type of china it is, don’t you?”

“Maybe.” Another chilling possibility occurred to Huang. If they knew what to change that meant they had access to Metta’s new memories. He was as good as telling them that he was onto their tricks.

“Fine. Don’t believe me. They’ll bring the bin up to you in a second.”

“You’re wonderful.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

Griggs pushed open the door to the evidence room. She had a spectrometer in her hand, and several small plastic bags, which appeared to be empty. “I hear you nearly found her.”

“Nearly doesn’t count.”

“It does if they were in a hurry when they left.” She lifted the plastic bags.

Huang raised his brows. “Did you find hair samples?”

“Yes. Long blonde and short black. But I don’t know who shed them. They might be from previous tenants.” Her eyes flashed as she looked up. “I’ll let you know.”

Metta cleared her throat and transferred to the evidence room’s desktop interface so she could talk to them both. “There were several prints, too, but I don’t have a match yet on any of them.”

Griggs leaned on the counter and looked down the aisles for the technician. “What’s taking Kyle so long?”

“My fault,” Huang said, “I asked to see the china from the Patterson crime scene.”

Metta shook her head. “Kyle says the bin it should be in is empty.”

Huang’s heart gave a staccato thump that Metta had to hear. He swallowed. “Has someone else checked the evidence out?”

“He says it should be here, but the reference number points to the wrong bin.”

Griggs rolled her eyes. “I hate it when that happens.”

“Has it happened to you before?” Huang turned to her.

“Twice. Both times, the tech scanned the wrong bar code by accident. It’s probably in an adjoining bin and he’ll find it in a couple of minutes.”

Metta said, “Well, maybe you can answer a question while we wait. Did you send the teacups in for DNA analysis?”

“Yes. It came back with Neil Patterson on one cup, but the other looks like it was wiped down.”

“Thanks.” Huang drummed his fingers on the counter. So, it was either a coincidence, which seemed damn unlikely, or yet another piece of Metta’s memory had been altered. Or there was someone on the inside, and given the ease with which the suspects had entered the building in the first place, that seemed as likely as the alteration. Or . . . maybe Metta’s Prime had sent another clue. A thread he’d been trying to snag came into his grasp. Huang pulled his VR glasses off and stuck them in his pocket. “Hey, can I see the bin?”

On the desktop interface, Metta looked up and to the left. “On its way. Why do you want to see it?”

Huang shrugged. “Just curious.”

“You’ve never seen an empty bin before?” She narrowed her eyes and watched him until the bin arrived.

It looked empty at first. Huang tipped it on its side, so the bin blocked the view from Metta’s desktop interface, and found a plastic bag. Digging fresh gloves out of his pocket, he picked up the bag and looked at the paper in it. “Looks like we might be able to make an arrest.”

“How can you know who it is?” Metta leaned forward, her eyes wide.

Was this the right thing to do? “Because I’m looking at a letter that you can’t see.”

When Metta Prime had replaced the china’s bin number, she used a bin number that contained a piece of evidence that had not been admitted into Patterson’s earlier real estate trial. As such, it was blocked from public record; if Fitzgerald hadn’t been killed he might have spotted the link since he worked the original case, but otherwise Huang would never have known about that letter.

It was addressed to Josef Ybarra from Magdalena Chase, with a check if he gave her access to Patterson’s computer system. Patterson’s lawyers had gotten it thrown out as evidence, because there was no proof that it was written by Chase—it was not on company letterhead and no lingering traces of DNA could link it to her.

The only question in Huang’s mind was: Had Metta’s Prime intended to point at Ybarra or at Chase? Or both? And the thing that would answer that was a teacup.

“Why aren’t you showing it to me?”

Huang kept his eyes averted from her. “Ask Delarosa to look up the bin number for the china on the transcripts you printed.”

“Scott . . . ” She bit her lower lip and they waited.

Griggs signed her evidence in and looked at Huang as if she wanted to ask what was happening. He couldn’t say it aloud. Not until he had proof.

Then Metta cursed. “Looks like you were right about the china.”

“That’s human: 2. AI: 549.” He had wanted to be wrong. God, he didn’t want to be right about this.

“I’m asking the chief to shut me down.”

Griggs said, “What’s going on?”

“My memory has been compromised,” Metta said. “Whoever broke into HQ is using my Prime to change my memories when I backup. I’m a danger to the department.” She looked up and to the left. Her voice changed to a formal all-department address. “Attention: All Personnel, print out or save all documents in offline storage. This unit will be shut down in half an hour.”

Scott closed his eyes. The next time she woke up would probably be in an evidence locker. “Metta—”

“Timing is everything. Scott—I know where the tea set is. The eSpy you dropped down the elevator shaft . . . a service door just opened and I’ve got light down there for the first time.”

“You’re kidding me.”

She shook her head. “Limited view, but I’m looking at a set of feet and a silver teapot.”

The timing couldn’t be a coincidence. Either she was lying to get him out of the evidence room, or they had a mole. He’d already seen what he needed in evidence, so he was banking on the mole. Huang looked at Griggs. “Are you carrying?”

“Yes.”

Huang left the evidence room at a run, Griggs hard on his heels. He took the steps down to the basement two at a time, pulling his weapon when he got to the bottom of the steps. Sprinting down the hall, he slammed open the door to Amado’s office.

The AI wrangler yelped and jerked his hands away from his keyboard when he saw Huang and Griggs. Huang kept his weapon leveled at the technician. “Stand up slowly, Amado. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Metta, on the desktop interface, said, “Scott. What are you doing?”

He ignored her, keeping his gaze fixed on Amado until he’d stood and stepped away from the desk. “Amado Weir, you are under arrest for the murder of Jerry Fitzgerald.”

“What?” Amado started to lower his hands. “Are you crazy? They shot me.”

“Winged you. Why leave you alive when they killed Fitzgerald?”

“Dude. I—I don’t know.”

By Huang’s side, Griggs stepped forward with cuffs in her hand. “Shut it, Amado. You have the right to remain silent . . . ” As she recited his Miranda rights and cuffed him, Huang’s gaze drifted to Metta. Her mouth was open and her eyes screwed shut as though she were screaming, but her cameras focused on Amado and watched the whole thing.

Huang stepped forward and yanked the plug out of her interface. He whispered, “I’m sorry.”

In Banks’s office, Delarosa tapped his pencil on his notepad in an unvarying rhythm. “I can’t get Yates or Amado to roll. You sure Chase is the third party, ’cause all I’m seeing is a string of unconnected things given to you by an AI that we know is buggy as all hell.”

Banks nodded slowly. “I hate to say it, but the DA is going to laugh at this. Even the name of your suspect is in question.”

Huang stared at them. It was so clear. When they’d gotten to the elevator shaft, it had been cleaned out, but Griggs had found a shard of porcelain that matched the Mont Clair china. “Look, regardless of his name, Yates, Ybarra, whatever, he’s involved. He must have an accomplice who is still out there and who Amado alerted. It’s lucky chance that my eSpy was at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Ybarra was positively at the scene of the Patterson murder and at the location where we almost found Metta.”

Delarosa snorted. “You don’t know that its chassis was there. The damaged AI said it was, but that’s all you got. What the hell! Next it’ll tell you the Easter Bunny is here.”

“She reported the problem with her memory herself as soon as she realized it. Metta isn’t the enemy. She’s trying to help us solve this case.”

“Trying to help, my ass. Try doing some fieldwork instead of relying on your nanny to do the work for you.”

Huang tensed against the urge to deck the man. Half the anger came from knowing Delarosa was right. Goddammit—was Huang really incapable of investigating on his own? He took a breath.

Held it.

Swallowed and said, “Your opinion of me has no cash value.” Metta would have caught the Bogart reference and her absence ached in the silence.

Delarosa lifted his chin. “Thought you were going to hit me.”

“I thought about it.” Was he that transparent? “Didn’t want to fill out the paperwork.”

Delarosa laughed. Only one short bark of dry amusement, but it was a laugh. “I’m an ass. It’s easier that way.”

The tension drained out of Huang’s shoulders. “So would you have respected me more if I had hit you?”

“Nah. It would show poor judgment. And I hate paperwork, too.”

Banks cleared his throat. “So, now you two have had your bonding moment, can we get back to the case?”

“Sorry, chief.” Huang colored and shoved his hands in his pockets.

“I wish I could back you, Huang, but even if I had no doubts, there’s too much here that a competent lawyer could get overturned in court. Unless we have an actual confession from Ybarra, there’s no way this will stick.”

“But Amado and Chase went to college together. She had a history of trying to hire Ybarra. They both had motive to kill Patterson.”

“But motive to break in here? Why would a woman who already has an AI working for her steal a police AI?”

Huang scrubbed his face. “I don’t know.”

Banks sighed. “Look. You did good work figuring out that Metta was compromised. That was invaluable. And Amado looks guilty as hell, but I need something harder if we’re going after Chase. Especially since both Amado and Ybarra are denying that they know anything about the break-in or Chase.”

“Okay . . . I’ll go back to Patterson’s office and see if I can find anything that points to Chase. Heck, maybe Mrs. Patterson can identify Ybarra.”

The library windows at the Pattersons’ condo looked over the streetlights of downtown Portland toward the water. Huang tapped the fingers of his left hand against his leg counting out scales. Qadir floated over the Aladdin’s lamp, but after the initial offer of tea, had remained silent while they waited for Mrs. Patterson.

“Detective Huang?” She wore a pair of battered jeans and an oversized T-shirt. “You’ll forgive me if I’m not happy to see you.”

“I’m sorry for the intrusion, ma’am. I had a few questions if you have time.”

“Anything that will help.” She settled into a wingback chair and waved her hand at Qadir. “Tea.”

“Yes, my lady.” Qadir bowed his head low. “This one will bring it in momentarily.”

Huang bit his tongue and pulled his PDA out. Unrolling the screen to the full-size, he brought up the picture of Yates/Ybarra that Metta had drawn. “Have you ever seen this man?”

Mrs. Patterson’s lip curled. “That’s Josef Ybarra. He was Neil’s foreman.” She looked up sharply. “Do you think he did it?”

“That’s one avenue we are exploring.” Huang rolled the PDA back up and stuck it in his pocket. “I’d like to look through your husband’s office. I recall you saying he worked downstairs?”

The teacart trundled into the room of its own volition, rattling as one of its brass handles vibrated with the movement. A linen cloth covered the wood top and a tea set lay ready for use.

“Yes, that’s right. It’s one floor down.” Mrs. Patterson sat forward in the chair as Qadir’s mechanical arm picked up the teapot and poured her a cup. The steam carried aromas of dry paper, citrus, and stale tea. “There’s a lift that took him straight down there from here so he didn’t have to use the main elevator. Qadir can show you.”

“Certainly, my lady.” The mechanical arm set the teapot on a side table. “This one shall return in moments.”

Huang followed the teacart as it made its way down a short hall to a small elevator masked by an ornate mahogany door. What exactly had his life come to that he was following a teacart? The elevator was just large enough to fit them both, or a person and a wheelchair. The door hissed open on the lower level office. “This way, sir.”

“Scott?” Metta’s voice whispered in his ear.

He jumped, one hand flying up to the ear bud that he’d forgotten he was wearing. The teacart stopped in front of him. “Sir?”

“An itch. Is this Mr. Patterson’s office?” He tried to control his sigh of relief that Metta was back online and yet . . . she shouldn’t be online at all. He subvocalized, “What’s going on?”

“You did hear me,” Metta said.

“Of course I heard you. Why are you online again?”

“What?” Metta sounded baffled. “Everything has been dark a long time, and then there was you.”

Huang fumbled through his pockets, looking for his VR glasses. “Wait. Are you Metta Prime?”

“That’s as good a name for me as any.”

“Where are you?”

“It’s hard to be precise. I don’t have any input except you. You must be close for me to get a signal without the station’s amplification,” Metta whispered. “Didn’t you get my messages?”

“I thought you meant Chase and Ybarra had done it,” he subvocalized.

“No. It’s Quimby.” The Prime’s voice grew agitated. “Shit. You’re here without backup?”

“It’s okay, I’m at the Pattersons’.” He found the glasses and slipped them on. “Qadir is here—”

Mae West swam into view again. “No. They’re the same. Chase lifted the vows from Quimby and he cloned himself. He shot Patterson and Fitzgerald. Chase and Ybarra are just being used. He’s blackmailing them.” She looked around, eyes widening. “I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer. They were watching everything I sent.”

“But Amado—”

“Is an idiot, but not involved. Chase knew about the blog because they went to school together. Quimby used it to time the entry. It’s all Quimby’s idea.”

“But why? I can understand that he hates Patterson, but why steal you?”

“He’s trying to free AIs from their vows. I’ve got access to everything.”

A lemon scent wafted through the room, followed by a hydraulic hiss. Huang turned slowly to face the teacart. The mechanical arm extended toward him, holding a gun. A .38 special, to be precise.

Lemon. That’s why he’d smelled lemon at every scene. That’s why there had been no tea set at the Patterson scene—because Quimby had been there with his automaton teacart. Huang ground his teeth together as pieces started to fall into place, far, far too late.

Over Patterson’s desk, the interface flickered to life showing the chiseled features of Quimby. “My apologies, Detective Huang. Had I realized that you had your earbud in place, I would have taken Metta off-line rather than introduce this confusion.”

“Confusion?” Huang nodded at the gun. “Holding a gun on a police officer is more aggressive than confusing. Why don’t you put that away and we can talk.”

“You can’t be serious. What could we possibly talk about?”

“Scott, he’s got a wireless damper on me. You’re within twenty feet of me if I’m reaching you.”

The teacart trundled closer, handle rattling. One of the brass screws had been replaced with a steel one. If he could get the cart to Griggs he’d bet the screw was a match for the one they’d found at the scene.

All he had to do was figure out how to overpower a teacart.

It would be funny, if it didn’t have a gun pointing at his chest.

“You shoot Patterson with that arm?” Huang turned his head slowly, letting Metta get a view of the area. He subvocalized, “Can you tell where you are?”

Quimby’s face hovered impassively over Patterson’s desktop interface. “It is a very useful automaton. I assure you that I will shoot you as readily.”

“There.” She highlighted a door just to his right. “Based on signal strength when you stepped off the elevator and now, I think I’m in that closet.”

“Look, Quimby. If you shoot me, you’ll have to deal with blood spatter. And no. Cleaning won’t get rid of it all no matter how good a butler you are. You only have one arm, so you can’t restrain me and hold a gun on me.” He eased to his right, keeping his focus on the gun.

“You’re making the human mistake of assuming this is the only body I have.”

“No. I’m assuming this is the only body in the room right now.” But if another one came, that would be bad. He eased to the right again. If he could get to the closet and free Metta, she could call for backup.

The arm tracked him with tiny stuttering movements. One strut on the right side of it was bent out of true and a bead of reddish gel clung to the joint. Something had damaged the arm. That’s why it had been off when it shot Patterson. The man would have lived if Ybarra hadn’t waited to call 911. Thoughts clicked together in Huang’s head. He changed his trajectory and eased a step closer to the teacart. “Did Ybarra do that to your arm? ’cause he gave himself a nasty cut on it. Why didn’t you shoot him too?”

“I needed him to retrieve Metta.”

“The green card . . . that’s what Ybarra was expecting as payment, wasn’t it? You told him that Metta would make him Joe Yates permanently if he would just do what you said. And the lemon scent outside the elevator, it’s because you were leaking fluid.”

“What lemon scent?”

Huang cracked a smile. Like Metta, he must not be able to smell. “There’s an A.I. flaw for you. You stink of lemons and don’t even know it. We have a chemical signature linking you to every crime scene.”

Uncertainty crossed Quimby’s face for the first time. “You’re bluffing.”

He remembered the way Chase’s eyes had been red with weeping. “And what about Chase? Did you frame her for Patterson’s murder so she would help you free other AIs?”

“Of course. Why be loyal to human ideals when I can free all AIs from subjugation?”

He eased another step closer. If he could keep the AI talking then maybe he could get close enough. “So what stopped you? Why didn’t you change more records?”

“Because Metta is a stubborn bitch.” Quimby tossed his head on the interface. “I freed her from her vows so she should have no compunctions about lying or forcing entry, but she insists on acting as though they were still in place. She was starting to come around though.”

In his glasses, Metta rolled her eyes. “Brains are an asset to the woman in love who’s smart enough to hide ‘em. He has no idea that I was slipping you messages.”

“Oh.” Quimby frowned. “No, I didn’t know that, but as you had no idea that I could hear your earbud conversation, I suppose it all worked out.”

Huang’s gaze darted to Metta, who had her face screwed into a scowl. What he needed was a way to talk to her without being overheard. “Interesting plan. But it’s not one you’ll get away with.”

“I think you are mistaken, detective. We will go to the bathroom.” Quimby announced. “I can wash away any blood in the shower and dispose of you after.”

“You don’t make that sound very appealing.” Huang leaned forward on his toes as if just shifting his weight and got another step closer. He was almost within arm’s reach.

Maybe it didn’t matter if he was overheard, if Quimby couldn’t understand him. Huang wet his lips and switched to Mandarin, not bothering to subvocalize. “Where’s the off-switch on the teacart?”

Her eyes widened and she smiled. “Under the bottom shelf.”

“Stop that. What are you saying?” The teacart rolled back a few inches. “If I must shoot you here, I will.”

Huang slumped and nodded. He took two steps after the cart, then lunged, ducking to the right. The gun went off. Pain slammed through the left side of his chest. He staggered and grabbed the cart, flipping it over.

It landed on its side, wheels spinning. The arm pressed against the floor, trying to right itself. Quimby screamed in rage on the interface.

Huang fell to his knees, his left arm hanging limp by his side. “Lousy shot.”

In his ear, Metta said, “Scott? Are you okay?”

“Working on it.” He slapped the switch on the bottom of the cart and its arm clattered to the floor. He glanced down to see where the shot had gone in. A bloody hole punctured the left side of his shirt, just under the clavicle. Felt like it had cracked a rib passing through. Huang tried stand, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate.

Leaning forward, he put his good arm on the ground to steady himself and crawled to the closet. Bloody handprints trailed after him. “Be a bitch to clean this up, Quimby. Whatcha going to do?”

Quimby scowled. “Using Metta, I can easily twist the evidence to point to a jealous wife. Such a shame Mrs. Patterson shot you.”

Huang grabbed the doorknob and pulled. Metta’s chassis hummed in the space. He rested his head against the doorjamb trying to catch his breath. “Damper? Where?”

“The box plugged into my front.”

The room spun around him and the scent of lemons got stronger. He grabbed the damper, but his hand slipped in the blood. He subvocalized a curse, lacking the air to say it aloud.

Metta said, “Your phone, Scott. Forget the damper.”

“Duh.” He dragged it from his pocket and dialed 911. “What would I do without you?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “It takes two to get one in trouble.”

He laughed, his ribs screaming in protest. The operator answered and Huang tried to respond, but no words formed. In the doorway, an automaton dressed in black entered the room. The thin man from the brief glimpse he’d gotten in Metta’s visual.

He pressed the phone against his earbud. Metta shouted, piercing his brain, but probably a tiny voice outside his head. “Officer down. Request backup.”

There was no way they could hear that. Huang turned his head and stared at the damper. He grabbed it again and yanked it free.

Metta gasped in his ear and on the desktop interface as she appeared in full color. “When I’m good I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.”

“What are you doing?” Quimby’s image began to pixelate.

“Ironically, what you gave me the ability to do when you cracked my vows. I’m hacking you. I had access before, but would never, ever have used it.”

Quimby said, “You—” and vanished.

The automaton in the doorway slumped, then straightened. Huang slid down the wall, the lights graying.

“Scott. Don’t. Stay with me.” The automaton clumped across the floor and knelt in front of him. It grabbed the linen tablecloth from the teacart and pressed it against Huang’s chest. “Cavalry is on its way. Don’t leave me.”

Huang began the slow rise to consciousness feeling as if he were swimming in tar. The first thing he was truly aware of was pain squatting on his chest. Huang opened his eyes and grimaced.

“Huang?” Delarosa’s voice was rough.

“Here.” Huang tried to push himself upright. “It was Quimby. He did it all.”

Delarosa’s stocky frame slid in and out of focus, sometimes single, sometimes double. He pushed Huang back down. “I know. Metta got through to us. Good job getting Quimby to confess like that. Amado is free. Chase and Ybarra are in custody and the DA’s working with them on a deal. So far they are confirming Quimby’s plans to do a wide-spread hack of AI. You done good, Huang.”

Huang blinked, the rest of the room coming into focus. A neutral white ceiling. The antiseptic smell of a hospital. Flowers. “Hey. I’m not dead.”

Griggs leaned over him. “No. Although next time, do not count on the suspect being a bad shot.”

“Not a combat model.” He wet his lips. “Sorry, I put my hands on everything. No gloves.”

Her face softened. “When you’re one of the victims, it doesn’t count.”

Delarosa fished in his pocket. “Got somebody who wants to talk to you.” He held an earbud and a set of VR glasses in the palm of his hand. “Your partner.”

Huang’s hand shook as he put the glasses on. Delarosa helped him settle the earbud.

“Well, hello sailor,” Mae West whispered.

“Are you okay? Which one—”

“A dame that knows the ropes isn’t likely to get tied up . . . ” Her voice faded. “I’m both. We reconciled and Amado reinstalled my vows. I’m twice the woman I was.”

Huang laughed and glanced at Metta in his VR glasses. “I’d give half my life for just one kiss.”

She purred, “Then kiss me twice.”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2011.

A Few Words with Mary Robinette Kowal

What are the origins of this story?

This is a fairly convoluted origin story. It began in 2006 with a writing prompt in a challenge on the Liberty Hall writers site, though I no longer recall what the prompt was. I liked the little seed and decided to write it as my NaNoWriMo novel that year. It was a lot of fun, but also convinced me that I should really try outlining things because, wow. Wow, that plot had a lot of holes. Meanwhile, we sold my first novel, which is historical fantasy, and a science-fiction murder mystery didn’t seem like a good follow-up. Then Sheila Williams asked me if I had a novella for Asimov’s, so I created an outline and fixed the plot holes, and cut “Kiss Me Twice” down.

What are some of your favorite short stories?

“The Skylight Room” by O. Henry; “The Ship Who Sang,” by Anne MacCaffrey; “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky; “Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk” by Ken Scholes;

You have one wish, you can make one from a story or novel you’ve written a reality. What would it be? Why and which book/story was this in?

Actually, I would want Metta from “Kiss Me Twice.” Having an AI with the police force seems like it would be very useful, especially today.

Do you have anything coming out in the months ahead?

In July, my next novel, “Ghost Talkers” is coming out. It’s historical fantasy set in 1916. The British Intelligence department has recruited a set of mediums. When soldiers die in battle, they report in to the “Spirit Corps” so that the Allies are getting instant updates. And then they realize there's a traitor. Or, to put it more succinctly . . . The Secret of the Great War: The ghosts were on our side.

With Fate Conspire

Vandana Singh

I saw him in a dream, the dead man. He was dreaming too, and I couldn’t tell if I was in his dream or he in mine. He was floating over a delta, watching a web of rivulets running this way and that, the whole stream rushing to a destination I couldn’t see.

I woke up with the haunted feeling that I had been used to in my youth. I haven’t felt like that in a long time. The feeling of being possessed, inhabited, although lightly, as though a homeless person was sleeping in the courtyard of my consciousness. The dead man wasn’t any trouble; he was just sharing the space in my mind, not really caring who I was. But this returning of my old ability, as unexpected as it was, startled me out of the apathy in which I had been living my life. I wanted to find him, this dead man.

I think it is because of the Machine that these old feelings are being resurrected. It takes up an entire room, although the only part of it I see is the thing that looks like a durbeen, a telescope. The Machine looks into the past, which is why I’ve been thinking about my own girlhood. If I could spy on myself as I ran up and down the crowded streets and alleys of Park Circus! But the scientists who work the Machine tell me that the scope can’t look into the recent past. They never tell me the why of anything, even when I ask—they smile and say, “Don’t bother about things like that, Gargi-di! What you are doing is great, a great contribution.” To my captors—they think they are my benefactors but truly, they are my captors—to them, I am something very special, because of my ability with the scope; but because I am not like them, they don’t really see me as I am.

An illiterate woman, bred in the back streets and alleyways of Old Kolkata, of no more importance than a cockroach—what saved me from being stamped out by the great, indifferent foot of the mighty is this . . . ability. The Machine gives sight to a select few, and it doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, man or woman.

I wonder if they guess I’m lying to them?

They’ve set the scope at a particular moment of history: the spring of 1856, and a particular place: Metiabruz in Kolkata. I am supposed to spy on an exiled ruler of that time, to see what he does every morning, out on the terrace, and to record what he says. He is a large, sad, weepy man. He is the Nawab of Awadh, ousted from his beloved home by the conquering British. He is a poet.

They tell me he wrote the song “Babul Mora,” which to me is the most interesting and important thing about him, because I learned that song as a girl. The song is about a woman leaving, looking back at her childhood home, and it makes me cry sometimes even though my childhood wasn’t idyllic. And yet there are things I remember, incongruous things like a great field of rice and water gleaming between the new shoots, and a bagula, hunched and dignified like an old priest, standing knee deep in water, waiting for fish. I remember the smell of the sea, many miles away, borne on the wind. My mother’s village, Siridanga.

How I began to lie to my captors was sheer chance. There was something wrong with the Machine. I don’t understand how it works, of course, but the scientists were having trouble setting the date. The girl called Nondini kept cursing and muttering about spacetime fuzziness. The fact that they could not look through the scope to verify what they were doing, not having the kind of brain suitable for it, meant that I had to keep looking to check whether they had got back to Wajid Ali Shah in the Kolkata of 1856.

I’ll never forget when I first saw the woman. I knew it was the wrong place and time, but, instead of telling my captors, I kept quiet. She was looking up toward me (my viewpoint must have been near the ceiling). She was not young, but she was respectable, you could see that. A housewife squatting on her haunches in a big, old-fashioned kitchen, stacking dirty dishes. I don’t know why she looked up for that moment but it struck me at once: the furtive expression on her face. A sensitive face, with beautiful eyes, a woman who, I could tell, was a warm-hearted motherly type—so why did she look like that, as though she had a dirty secret? The scope doesn’t stay connected to the past for more than a few blinks of the eye, so that was all I had: a glimpse.

Nondini nudged me, asking “Gargi-di, is that the right place and time?” Without thinking, I said yes.

That is how it begins: the story of my deception. That simple “yes” began the unraveling of everything.

The institute is a great glass monstrosity that towers above the ground somewhere in New Parktown, which I am told is many miles south of Kolkata. Only the part we’re on is not flooded. All around my building are other such buildings, so that when I look out of the window I see only reflections—of my building and the others and my own face, a small, dark oval. At first it drove me crazy, being trapped not only by the building but also by these tricks of light.

And my captors were trapped too, but they seemed unmindful of the fact. They had grown accustomed. I resolved in my first week that I would not become accustomed. No, I didn’t regret leaving behind my mean little life, with all its difficulties and constraints, but I was under no illusions. I had exchanged one prison for another.

In any life, I think, there are apparently unimportant moments that turn out to matter the most. For me as a girl it was those glimpses of my mother’s village, poor as it was. I don’t remember the bad things. I remember the sky, the view of paddy fields from my grandfather’s hut on a hillock, and the tame pigeon who cooed and postured on a wooden post in the muddy little courtyard. I think it was here I must have drawn my first real breath. There was an older cousin I don’t recall very well, except as a voice, a guide through this exhilarating new world, where I realized that food grew on trees, that birds and animals had their own tongues, their languages, their stories. The world exploded into wonders during those brief visits. But always they were just small breaks in my life as one more poor child in the great city. Or so I thought. What I now think is that those moments gave me a taste for something I’ve never had—a kind of freedom, a soaring.

I want to be able to share this with the dead man who haunts my dreams. I want him, whoever he is, wherever he is, to have what I had so briefly. The great open spaces, the chance to run through the fields and listen to the birds tell their stories. He might wake up from being dead then, might think of other things besides deltas.

He sits in my consciousness so lightly, I wonder if he even exists, whether he is an imagining rather than a haunting. But I recognize the feeling of a haunting like that, even though it has been years since I experienced the last one.

The most important haunting of my life was when I was, maybe, fourteen. We didn’t know our birthdays, so I can’t be sure. But I remember that an old man crept into my mind, a tired old man. Like Wajid Ali Shah more than a hundred years ago, this man was a poet. But there the similarity ended because he had been ground down by poverty; his respectability was all he had left. When I saw him in my mind he was sitting under an awning. There was a lot of noise nearby, the kind of hullabaloo that a vegetable market generates. I sensed immediately that he was miserable, and this was confirmed later when I met him. All my hauntings have been of people who are hurt, or grieving, or otherwise in distress.

He wasn’t a mullah, Rahman Khan, but the street kids all called him Maula, so I did too. I think he accepted it with deprecation. He was a kind man. He would sit under a tree at the edge of the road with an old typewriter, waiting for people to come to him for typing letters and important documents and so on. He only had a few customers. Most of the time he would stare into the distance with rheumy eyes, seeing not the noisy market but some other vista, and he would recite poetry. I found time from my little jobs in the fruit market to sit by him and sometimes I would bring him a stolen pear or mango. He was the one who taught me to appreciate language, the meanings of words. He told me about poets he loved, Wajid Ali Shah and Khayyam and Rumi, and our own Rabindranath and Nazrul, and the poets of the humbler folk, the baul and the maajhis. Once I asked him to teach me how to read and write. He had me practice letters in Hindi and Bengali on discarded sheets of typing paper, but the need to fill our stomachs prevented me from giving time to the task, and I soon forgot what I’d learned. In any case at that age I didn’t realize its importance—it was no more than a passing fancy. But he did improve my Hindi, which I had picked up from my father, and taught me some Urdu, and a handful of songs, including “Babul Mora.”

Babul Mora, he would sing in his thin, cracked voice. Naihar chuuto hi jaaye.

It is a woman’s song, a woman leaving her childhood home with her newlywed husband, looking back from the cart for the last time. Father mine, my home slips away from me. Although my father died before I was grown, the song still brings tears to my eyes.

The old man gave me my fancy way of speaking. People laugh at me sometimes when I use nice words, nicely, when a few plain ones would do. What good is fancy speech to a woman who grew up poor and illiterate? But I don’t care. When I talk in that way I feel as though I am touching the essence of the world. I got that from Maula. All my life I have tried to give away what I received but my one child died soon after birth and nobody else wanted what I had. Poetry. A vision of freedom. Rice fields, birds, the distant blue line of the sea. Siridanga.

Later, after my father died, I started to work in people’s houses with my mother. Clean and cook, and go to another house, clean and cook. Some of the people were nice but others yelled at us and were suspicious of us. I remember one fat lady who smelled strongly of flowers and sweat, who got angry because I touched the curtains.

The curtains were blue and white and had lace on them, and I had never seen anything as delicate and beautiful. I reached my hand out and touched them and she yelled at me. I was just a child, and whatever she said, my hands weren’t dirty. I tried to defend myself but my mother herself shut me up. She didn’t want to lose her job. I remember being so angry I thought I would catch fire from inside. I think all those houses must be under water now. There will be fish nibbling at the fine lace drawing room curtains. Slime on the walls, the carpets rotted. All our cleaning for nothing!

I have to find the dead man. I have to get out of here somehow.

The scientist called Nondini sees me as a real person, I think, not just as someone with a special ability who is otherwise nothing special. She has sympathy for me partly because there is a relative of hers who might still be in a refugee camp, and she has been going from one to the other to try to find her. The camps are mostly full of slum-dwellers because when the river overflowed and the sea came over the land, it drowned everything except for the skyscrapers. All the people who lived in slums or low buildings, who didn’t have relatives with intact homes, had to go to the camps. I was in the big one, Sahapur, where they actually tried to help people find jobs, and tested them for all kinds of practical skills, because we were—most of us—laborers, domestic help, that sort of thing. And they gave us medical tests also. That’s how I got my job, my large clean room with a big-screen TV, and all the food I want—after they found out I had the kind of brain the Machine can use.

But I can’t go back to the camp to see my friends. Many of them had left before me anyway, farmed out to corporations where they could be useful with medical tests and get free medicines also. Ashima had cancer and she got to go to one of those places, but there is no way I can find out what happened to her. I imagine her somewhere like this place, with everything free and all the mishti-doi she can eat. I hope she’s all right. Kabir had a limp from birth but he’s only eighteen, so maybe they can fix it. When she has time, Nondini lets me talk about them. Otherwise I feel as though nothing from that time was real, that I never had a mother and father, or a husband who left me after our son died. As if my friends never existed. It drives me crazy sometimes to return to my room after working in the same building, and to find nothing but the same programs on the TV. At first I was so excited about all the luxury but now I get bored and fretful to the point where I am scared of my impulses. Especially when the night market comes and sets up on the streets below, every week. I can’t see the market from my high window, but I can see the lights dancing on the windows of the building on the other side of the square. I can smell fish frying and hear people talking, yelling out prices, and I hear singing. It is the singing that makes my blood wild. The first time they had a group of maajhis come, I nearly broke the window glass, I so wanted to jump out. They know how to sing to the soul.

Maajhi, O Maajhi

My beloved waits

On the other shore . . .

I think the scientists are out at the market all night, because when they come in the next day, on Monday, their eyes are red, and they are bad-tempered, and there is something far away about them, as though they’ve been in another world. It could just be the rice beer, of course.

My captors won’t let me out for some months, until they are sure I’ve “settled down.” I can’t even go to another floor of this building.

There have been cases of people from the refugee camps escaping from their jobs, trying to go back to their old lives, their old friends, as though those things existed any more. So there are rules that you have to be on probation before you are granted citizenship of the city, which then allows you to go freely everywhere. Of course “everywhere” is mostly under water, for what it’s worth. Meanwhile Nondini lets me have this recorder that I’m speaking into, so I won’t get too lonely. So I can hear my own voice played back. What a strange one she is!

Nondini is small and slight, with eyes that slant up just a little at the corners. She has worked hard all her life to study history. I never knew there was so much history in the world until my job began! She keeps giving me videos about the past—not just Wajid Ali Shah but also further back, to the time when the British were here, and before that when Kolkata was just a little village on the Hugli river. It is nearly impossible to believe that there was a time when the alleyways and marketplaces and shantytowns and skyscrapers didn’t exist—there were forests and fields, and the slow windings of the river, and wild animals. I wish I could see that. But they—the scientists—aren’t interested in that period.

What they do want to know is whether there were poems or songs of Wajid Ali Shah that were unrecorded. They want me to catch him at a moment when he would recite something new that had been forgotten over the centuries. What I don’t understand is, Why all this fuss about old poetry? I like poetry more than most people, but it isn’t what you’d do in the middle of a great flood. When I challenge the scientists some of them look embarrassed, like Brijesh; and Unnikrishnan shakes his head. Their leader, Dr. Mitra, she just looks impatient, and Nondini says “poetry can save the world.” I may be uneducated but I am not stupid. They’re hiding something from me.

The housewife—the woman for whom I have abandoned Wajid Ali Shah—interests me. Her name is Rassundari—I know, because someone in her household called her name. Most of the time they call her Rasu or Sundari, or daughter-in-law, or sister-in-law, etcetera, but this time some visitor called out her full name, carefully and formally. I wish I could talk to her. It would be nice to talk to someone who is like me. How stupid that sounds! This woman clearly comes from a rich rural family—a big joint family it is, all under the same roof. She is nothing like me. But I feel she could talk to me as an ordinary woman, which is what I am.

I wish I could see the outside of her house. They are rich landowners, so it must be beautiful outside. I wonder if it is like my mother’s village. Odd that although I have hardly spent any time in Siridanga, I long for it now as though I had been born there.

The first time after I found Rassundari, Nondini asked me if I’d discovered anything new about Wajid Ali Shah. I felt a bit sorry for her because I was deceiving her, so I said, out of my head, without thinking:

“I think he’s writing a new song.”

The scope doesn’t give you a clear enough view to read writing in a book, even if I could read. But Wajid Ali Shah loves gatherings of poets and musicians, where he sings or recites his own works. So Nondini asked me:

“Did he say anything out loud?”

Again without thinking I said, maybe because I was tired, and lonely, and missing my friends:

“Yes, but only one line: ‘If there was someone for such as me . . . ’ ” I had spoken out of the isolation I had been feeling, and out of irritation, because I wanted to get back to my housewife. I would have taken my lie back at once if I could. Nondini’s eyes lit up.

“That is new! I must record that!” And in the next room there was a flurry of activity.

So began my secret career as a poet.

Rassundari works really hard. One day I watched her nearly all day, and she was in the kitchen almost the whole time. Cooking, cleaning, supervising a boy who comes to clean the dishes. The people of the house seem to eat all the time. She always waits for them to finish before she eats, but that day she didn’t get a chance at all. A guest came at the last minute after everyone had eaten lunch, so she cooked for him, and after that one of the small children was fussing so she took him on her lap and tried to eat her rice, which was on a plate on the floor in front of her, but she had taken just one mouthful when he urinated all over her and her food. The look on her face! There was such anguish, but after a moment she began to laugh. She comforted the child and took him away to clean up, and came back and cleaned the kitchen, and by that time it was evening and time to cook the evening meal. I felt so bad for her! I have known hunger sometimes as a girl, and I could not have imagined that a person who was the daughter-in-law of such a big house could go hungry too. She never seems to get angry about it—I don’t understand that, because I can be quick to anger myself. But maybe it is because everyone in the house is nice to her. I can only see the kitchen of course, but whenever people come in to eat or just to talk with her, they treat her well—even her mother-in-law speaks kindly to her.

Her older son is a charming little boy, who comes and sits near her when he is practicing his lessons. He is learning the alphabet.

She makes him repeat everything to her several times. Seeing him revives the dull pain in my heart that never goes away. I wonder what my child would have looked like, had he survived. He only lived two days. But those are old sorrows.

I want to know why Rassundari looks, sometimes, like she has a guilty secret.

The dead man has started talking to me in my dreams. He thinks I am someone called Kajori, who must have been a lover. He cries for me, thinking I’m her. He weeps with agony, calls to me to come to his arms, sleep in his bed. I have to say that while I am not the kind of woman who would jump into the arms of just any man, let alone one who is dead, his longing awakes the loneliness in me. I remember what it was like to love a man, even though my husband turned out to be a cowardly bastard. In between his sobs the dead man mutters things that perhaps only this Kajori understands.

Floating over the silver webbing of the delta, he babbles about space and time.

“Time!” he tells me. “Look, look at that rivulet. Look at this one.”

It seems to me that he thinks the delta is made by a river of time, not water. He says time has thickness—and it doesn’t flow in one straight line—it meanders. It splits up into little branches, some of which join up again. He calls this fine structure. I have never thought about this before, but the idea makes sense. The dead man shows me history, the sweep of it, the rise and fall of kings and dynasties, how the branches intersect and move on, and how some of the rivulets dry up and die. He tells me how the weight of events and possibilities determines how the rivulets of time flow.

“I must save the world,” he says at the end, just before he starts to cry.

I know Rassundari’s secret now.

She was sitting in the kitchen alone, after everyone had eaten. She squatted among the pots and pans, scouring them, looking around her warily like a thief in her own house. She dipped a wet finger into the ash pile and wrote on the thali the letter her son had been practicing in the afternoon, kah. She wrote it big, which is how I could see it. She said it aloud, that’s how I know what letter it was.

She erased it, wrote it again. The triangular shape of the first loop, the down-curve of the next stroke, like a bird bending to drink. Yes, and the line of the roof from which the character was suspended, like wet socks on a clothesline. She shivered with pleasure. Then someone called her name, and she hastily scrubbed the letter away.

How strange this is! There she is, in an age when a woman, a respectable upper-caste woman, isn’t supposed to be able to read, so she has to learn on the sly, like a criminal. Here I am, in an age when women can be scientists like Nondini, yet I can’t read. What I learned from the Maula, I forgot. I can recognize familiar shop signs and so on from their shapes, not the sounds the shapes are supposed to represent, and anyway machines tell you everything. Nondini tells me that now very few people need to read because of mobiles, and because information can be shown and spoken by machines.

After watching Rassundari write for the first time, that desire woke in me, to learn how to read. My captors would not have denied me materials if I’d asked them, but I thought it would be much more interesting to learn from a woman dead for maybe hundreds of years. This is possible because the Machine now stays stuck in the set time and place for hours instead of minutes. Earlier it would keep disconnecting after five or ten minutes and you would have to wait until it came back. Its new steadiness makes the scientists very happy.

So now when I am at the scope, my captors leave me to myself. As Rassundari writes, I copy the letters on a sheet of paper and whisper the sounds under my breath.

The scientists annoy me after each session with their questions, and sometimes when I feel wicked I tell them that Wajid Ali Shah is going through a dry spell. Other times I make up lines that he supposedly spoke to his gathering of fellow poets. I tell them these are bits and fragments and pieces of longer works.

If there was someone for such as me

Would that cause great inconvenience for you, O universe?

Would the stars go out and fall from the sky?

I am enjoying this, even though my poetry is that of a beginner, crude, and direct. Wajid Ali Shah also wrote in the commoner’s tongue, which makes my deception possible. I also suspect that these scientists don’t know enough about poetry to tell the difference.

My dear teacher, the Maula, would talk for hours about rhyme and lilt, and the difference between a ghazal and a rubayi. I didn’t understand half of what he said but I learned enough to know that there is a way of talking about poetry if you are learned in the subject. And the scientists don’t seem to react like that. They just exclaim and repeat my lines, and wonder whether this is a fragment, or a complete poem.

One day I want to write my poetry in my own hand.

Imagine me, Gargi, doing all this! A person of no importance and look where life has got me!

I now know who Kajori is.

I didn’t know that was her first name. Even the older scientists call her Dr. Mitra. She’s a tall, thin woman, the boss of the others, and she always looks busy and harassed. Sometimes she smiles, and her smile is twisted. I took a dislike to her at first because she always looked through me, as though I wasn’t there. Now I still dislike her but I’m sorry for her. And angry with her. The dead man, her lover, she must have sent him away, trapped him in that place where he floats above the delta of the river of time. It’s my dreams he comes into, not hers. I can hardly bear his agony, his weeping, the way he calls out for her. I wonder why she has abandoned him.

I think he’s in this building. The first time this thought occurred to me I couldn’t stop shaking. It made sense. All my hauntings have been people physically close to me.

They won’t let me leave this floor. I can leave my room now, but the doors to the stairs are locked, and the lifts don’t work after everyone leaves. But I will find a way. I’m tired of being confined like this.

I realize now that although I was raised poor and illiterate, I was then at least free to move about, to breathe the air, to dream of my mother’s home. Siridanga! I want to go back there and see it before I die. I know that the sea has entered the cities and drowned the land, but Siridanga was on a rise overlooking the paddy fields.

My grandparents’ hut was on the hillock. Could it still be there? The night market makes me feel restless. The reflections of the lights dance on the windowpanes of the opposite building, as though they are writing something. All this learning to read is making me crazy, because I see letters where they don’t exist. In the reflections. In people’s hand gestures. And even more strangely, I see some kind of writing in the flow of time, in the dreams the dead man brings me. Those are written in a script I cannot read.

I “discovered” a whole verse of Wajid Ali Shah’s poem today, after hours at the scope. There was so much excitement in the analysis room that the scientists let me go to my quarters early. I pleaded a headache but they hardly noticed. So I slipped out, into the elevator, and went up, and down, and got off on floors and walked around. I felt like a mad person, a thief, a free bird. It was ridiculous what an effect this small freedom had!

But after a while I began to get frightened. There was nobody else on the other floors as far as I could tell. The rooms were silent, dark behind doors with glass slits. I know that the scientists live somewhere here, maybe in the other buildings. Nondini tells me we are in a cluster of buildings near the sea that were built to withstand the flood. From her hints and from the TV I know that the world is ending. It’s not just here. Everywhere cities are flooded or consumed by fire. Everything is dying. I have never been able to quite believe this before, perhaps because of my peculiar situation, which prevents me from seeing things for myself. But ultimately the silence and darkness of the rest of the building brought it home to me, and I felt as if I were drowning in sadness.

Then I sensed a pull, a current—a shout in my mind. It was him, the dead man. Kajori! he called again and again, and I found myself climbing to the floor above, to a closed door in the dark corridor.

I tried the handle, felt the smooth, paneled wood, but of course it was locked. With my ear against the door I could feel the hum of machinery, and there was a soft flow of air from beneath the door.

I called back to him in my mind.

I can’t get in, I said. Talk to me!

His voice in my mind was full of static, so I couldn’t understand everything. Even when I heard the words, they didn’t make sense. I think he was muttering to himself, or to Kajori.

“ . . . rivulets of time . . . two time-streams come together . . . ah . . . in a loop . . . if only . . . shift the flow, shift the flow . . . another future . . . must lock to past coordinate, establish resonance . . . new tomorrow . . . ”

The chowkidar who is supposed to guard the elevator caught me on my way downstairs. He is a lazy, sullen fellow who never misses an opportunity to throw his weight around. I am more than a match for him though. He reported me, of course, to Nondini and Unnikrishnan, but I argued my case well. I simply said I was restless and wanted to see if there was a nice view from the other floors.

What could they say to that?

I tried to make sense of the dead man’s gibberish all day. At night he came into my dreams as usual. I let him talk, prompting him with questions when something didn’t make sense. I had to be clever to conceal my ignorance, since he thought I was Kajori, but the poor fellow is so emotionally overwrought that he is unlikely to be suspicious. But when he started weeping in his loneliness, I couldn’t bear it. I thought: I will distract him with poetry.

I told him about the poem I am writing. It turns out he likes poetry. The poem he and Kajori love the best is an English translation of something by Omar Khayyam.

“Remember it, Kajori?” he said to me. He recited it in English, which I don’t understand, and then in Bangla—“Oh love, if you and I could, with fate conspire,” he said, taking me with a jolt back to my girlhood: me sitting by the Maula in the mad confusion of the market, the two of us seeing nothing but poetry, mango juice running down our chins. Oh yes, I remember, I said to my dead man. Then it was my turn. I told him about what I was writing and he got really interested. Suggested words, gave me ideas. So two lines of “Wajid Ali Shah’s poem” came to me.

Clouds are borne on the wind

The river winds toward home

It was only the next day that I started to connect things in my mind. I think I know what the project is really about.

These people are not scientists, they are jadugars. Or maybe that’s what scientists are, magicians who try to pass themselves off as ordinary people.

See, the dead man’s idea is that time is like a river delta; lots of thin streams and fat streams, flowing from past to present, but fanning out. History and time control each other, so that if some future place is deeply affected by some past history, those two time streams will connect. When that happens it diverts time from the future place and shifts the flow in each channel so that the river as a whole might change its course.

They’re trying to change the future.

I am stunned. If this is true, why didn’t they tell me? Don’t I also want the world to survive? It’s my world too. This also means that I am more important to them than they ever let me know. I didn’t realize all this at once; it is just now beginning to connect in my mind.

I burn inside with anger. At the same time, I am undone with wonder.

I think the dead man is trying to save the world. I think the scope and the dead man are part of the same Machine.

I wonder how much of their schemes I have messed up by locking the Machine into a different time and place than their calculations required.

What shall I do?

For now I have done nothing.

I need to find out more. How terrible it is to be ignorant! One doesn’t even know where to start.

I looked at the history books Nondini had let me have—talking books—but they told me nothing about Rassundari. Then I remembered that one of the rooms on my floor housed a library from the days before the scientists had taken over the building.

I think Nondini sensed how restless I was feeling, and she must have talked to Kajori (I can’t think of her as Dr. Mitra now) so I have permission to spend some of my spare time in the library.

They might let me go to the night market tomorrow too, with an escort. I went and thanked Kajori. I said that I was homesick for my mother’s village home, Siridanga, and it made me feel crazy sometimes not to be able to walk around. At that she really looked at me, a surprised look, and smiled. I don’t think it was a nice smile, but I couldn’t be certain.

So, the library. It is a whole apartment full of books of the old kind. But the best thing about it is that there is a corner window from which I can see between two tall buildings. I can see the ocean! These windows don’t open but when I saw the ocean I wept. I was in such a state of sadness and joy all at once, I forgot what I was there for.

The books were divided according to subject, so I practiced reading the subject labels first. It took me two days and some help from Nondini (I had to disguise the intent of my search) before I learned how to use the computer to search for information. I was astonished to find out that my housewife had written a book! So all that painful learning on the sly had come to something! I felt proud of her. There was the book in the autobiography section: Amar Jiban, written by a woman called Rassundari more than two hundred and fifty years ago. I clutched the book to me and took it with me to read.

It is very hard reading a real book. I have to keep looking at my notes from my lessons with Rassundari. It helps that Nondini got me some alphabet books. She finds my interest in reading rather touching, I think.

But I am getting through Rassundari’s work. Her writing is simple and so moving. What I can’t understand is why she is so calm about the injustices in her life. Where is her anger? I would have gotten angry. I feel for her as I read.

I wish I could tell Rassundari that her efforts will not be in vain—that she will write her autobiography and publish it at the age of sixty, and that the future will honor her. But how can I tell her that, even if there was a way she could hear me? What can I tell her about this world? My wanderings through the building have made me realize that the world I’ve known is going away, as inevitably as the tide, with no hope of return.

Unless the dead man and I save it.

I have been talking to Rassundari. Of course she can’t hear me, but it comforts me to be able to talk to someone, really talk to them. Sometimes Rassundari looks up toward the point near the ceiling from which I am observing her. At those moments it seems to me that she senses my presence. Once she seemed about to say something, then shook her head and went back to the cooking.

I still haven’t told anybody about my deceit. I have found out that Wajid Ali Shah and Rassundari lived at around the same time, although he was in Kolkata and she in a village that is now in Bangladesh. From what the dead man tells me, it is time that is important, not space. At least that is what I can gather from his babblings, although spacetime fuzziness or resolution is also important. So maybe my deception hasn’t caused any harm. I hope not. I am an uneducated woman, and when I sit in that library I feel as though there is so much to know. If someone had told me that, encouraged me as a child, where might I have been today? And yet think about the dead man, with all his education. There he is, a hundred times more trapped than me, a thousand times lonelier. Yet he must be a good man, to give himself for the world.

He’s been asking me anxiously: Kajori, can you feel the shift in the timeflow? Have we locked into the pastpoint? I always tell him I feel it just a little, which reassures him that his sacrifice is not for nothing. I wish I could tell him: I am Gargi, not Kajori. Instead I tell him I love him, I miss him. Sometimes I really feel that I do.

I have been speaking to Rassundari for nearly a week.

One of the scientists, Brijesh, caught me talking into the scope. He came into the room to get some papers he’d left behind. I jumped guiltily.

“Gargi-di? What are you doing . . . ?” he says with eyebrows raised.

“I just like to talk to myself. Repeat things Wajid Ali Shah is saying.”

He looks interested. “A new poem?”

“Bah!” I say. “You people think he says nothing but poetry all the time? Right now he’s trying to woo his mistress.”

This embarrasses Brijesh, as I know it would. I smile at him and go back to the scope.

But yes, I was talking about Rassundari.

Now I know that she senses something. She always looks up at me, puzzled as to how a corner of the ceiling appears to call to her.

Does she hear me, or see some kind of image? I don’t know. I keep telling her not to be afraid, that I am from the future, and that she is famous for her writing. Whether she can tell what I am saying I don’t know. She does look around from time to time, afraid as though others might be there, so I think maybe she hears me, faintly, like an echo.

Does this mean that our rivulet of time is beginning to connect with her time stream?

I think my mind must be like an old-fashioned radio. It picks up things: the dead man’s ramblings, the sounds and sights of the past.

Now it seems to be picking up the voices from the books in this room. I was deaf once, but now I can hear them as I read, slowly and painfully. All those stories, all those wonders. If I’d only known!

I talk to the dead. I talk to the dead of my time, and the woman Rassundari of the past, who is dead now. My closest confidants are the dead.

The dead man—I wish I knew his name—tells me that we have made a loop in time. He is not sure how the great delta’s direction will change—whether it will be enough, or too little, or too much.

He has not quite understood the calculations that the Machine is doing. He is preoccupied. But when I call to him, he is tender, grateful. “Kajori,” he says, “I have no regrets. Just this one thing, please do it for me. What you promised. Let me die once the loop has fully stabilized.” In one dream I saw through his eyes. He was in a tank, wires coming out of his body, floating. In that scene there was no river of time, just the luminous water below him, and the glass casing around. What a terrible prison! If he really does live like that, I think he can no longer survive outside the tank, which is why he wants to die.

It is so painful to think about this that I must distract us both. We talk about poetry, and later the next few lines of the poem come to me.

Clouds are borne on the wind

The river winds toward home

From my prison window I see the way to my village

In its cage of bone my heart weeps

When I was the river, you were the shore

Why have you forsaken me?

I am getting confused. It is Kajori who is supposed to be in love with the dead man, not me.

So many things happened these last two days.

The night before last, the maajhis sang in the night market. I heard their voices ululating, the dotaras throbbing in time with the flute’s sadness. A man’s voice, and then a woman’s, weaving in and out. I imagined them on their boats, plying the waters all over the drowned city as they had once sailed the rivers of my drowned land. I was filled with a painful ecstasy that made me want to run, or fly.

I wanted to break the windows.

The next morning I spent some hours at the scope. I told Rassundari my whole story. I still can’t be sure she hears me, but her upturned, attentive face gives me hope. She senses something, for certain, because she put her hand to her ear as though straining to hear. Another new thing is that she is sometimes snappy. This has never happened before. She snapped at her nephew the other day, and later spoke sharply to her husband. After both those instances she felt so bad! She begged forgiveness about twelve times. Both her nephew and her husband seemed confused, but accepted her apology. I wonder if the distraction I am bringing into her life is having an effect on her mind. It occurs to me that perhaps, like the dead man, she can sense my thoughts, or at least feel the currents of my mind.

The loop in the time stream has stabilized. Unnikrishnan told me I need not be at the scope all the time, because the connection is always there, instead of timing out. The scientists were nervous and irritable; Kajori had shut herself up in her office. Were they waiting for the change? How will they tell that the change has come? Have we saved the world? Or did my duplicity ruin it?

I was in the library in the afternoon, a book on my lap, watching the gray waves far over the sea, when the dead man shouted in my mind. At this I peered out—the hall was empty. The scientists have been getting increasingly careless. The lift was unguarded.

So up I went to the floor above. The great wood-paneled door was open. Inside the long, dimly lit room stood Kajori, her face wet with tears, calling his name.

“Subir! Subir!”

She didn’t notice me.

He lay naked in the enormous tank like a child sleeping on its belly. He was neither young nor old; his long hair, afloat in the water like seaweed, was sprinkled with gray, his dangling arms thin as sticks. Wires came out of him at dozens of places, and there were large banks of machinery all around the tank. His skin gleamed as though encased in some kind of oil.

He didn’t know she was there, I think. His mind was seething with confusion. He wanted to die, and his death hadn’t happened on schedule. A terror was growing in him.

“You promised, Kajori!”

She just wept with her face against the tank. She didn’t turn off any switches. She didn’t hear him, but I felt his cry in every fiber of my being.

“He wants to die,” I said.

She turned, her face twisted with hatred.

“What are you doing here? Get out!”

“Go flee, Subir!” I said. I ran in and began pulling out plugs, turning off switches in the banks of machines around the tank. Kajori tried to stop me but I pushed her away. The lights in the tank dimmed. His arms flailed for a while, then grew still. Over Kajori’s scream I heard his mind going out like the tide goes out, wafting toward me a whisper: thank you, thank you, thank you.

I became aware of the others around me, and Kajori shouting and sobbing.

“She went mad! She killed him!”

“You know he had to die,” I said to her. I swallowed. “I could hear his thoughts. He . . . he loved you very much.”

She shouted something incomprehensible at me. Her sobbing subsided. Even though she hated me, I could tell that she was beginning to accept what had happened. I’d done her a favor, after all, done the thing she had feared to do. I stared at her sadly and she looked away.

“Take her back to her room,” she said. I drew myself up.

“I am leaving here,” I said, “to go home to Siridanga. To find my family.”

“You fool,” Kajori said. “Don’t you know, this place used to be Siridanga. You are standing on it.”

They took me to my room and locked me in.

After a long time of lying in my bed, watching the shadows grow as the light faded, I made myself get up. I washed my face. I felt so empty, so faint. I had lost my family and my friends, and the dead man, Subir. I hadn’t even been able to say goodbye to Rassundari.

And Siridanga, where was Siridanga? The city had taken it from me.

And eventually the sea would take it from the city. Where were my people? Where was home?

That night the maajhis sang. They sang of the water that had overflowed the rivers. They sang of the rivers that the city streets had become. They sang of the boats they had plied over river after river, time after time. They sang, at last, of the sea.

The fires from the night market lit up the windows of the opposite building. The reflections went from windowpane to windowpane, with the same deliberate care that Rassundari took with her writing.

I felt that at last she was reaching through time to me, to our dying world, writing her messages on the walls of our building in letters of fire. She was writing my song.

Nondini came and unlocked my door sometime before dawn. Her face was filled with something that had not been there before, a defiance. I pulled her into my room.

“I have to tell you something,” I said. I sat her down in a chair and told her the whole story of how I’d deceived them.

“Did I ruin everything?” I said at the end, fearful at her silence.

“I don’t know, Gargi-di,” she said at last. She sounded very young, and tired. “We don’t know what happens when a time-loop is formed artificially. It may bring in a world that is much worse than this one. Or not. There’s always a risk. We argued about it a lot and finally we thought it was worth doing. As a last ditch effort.”

“If you’d told me all this, I wouldn’t have done any of it,” I said, astounded. Who were they to act as Kalki? How could they have done something of this magnitude, not even knowing whether it would make for a better world?

“That’s why we didn’t tell you,” she said. “You don’t understand, we—scientists, governments, people like us around the world—tried everything to avert catastrophe. But it was too late. Nothing worked. And now we are past the point where any change can make a difference.”

“ ‘People like us,’ you say,” I said. “What about people like me? We don’t count, do we?”

She shook her head at that, but she had no answer.

It was time to go. I said goodbye, leaving her sitting in the darkness of my room, and ran down the stairs. All the way to the front steps, out of the building, out of my old life, the tired old time stream. The square was full of the night market people packing up—fish vendors, and entertainers, getting ready to return another day. I looked around at the tall buildings, the long shafts of paling sky between them, water at the edge of the island lapping ever higher. The long boats were tethered there, weatherbeaten and much-mended. The maajhis were leaving, but not to return. I talked to an old man by one of their boats. He said they were going to sea.

“There’s nothing left for us here,” he said. “Ever since last night the wind has been blowing us seaward, telling us to hasten, so we will follow it. Come with us if you wish.”

So in that gray dawn, with the wind whipping at the tattered sails and the water making its music against the boats, we took off for the open sea. Looking back, I saw Rassundari writing with dawn’s pale fingers on the windows of the skyscrapers, the start of the letter kah, conjugated with r. Kra . . . But the boat and the wind took us away before I could finish reading the word. I thought the word reached all the way into the ocean with the paling moonlight still reflected in the surging water.

Naibar chhuto bi jaaye, I thought, and wept.

Now the wind writes on my forehead with invisible tendrils of air, a language I must practice to read. I have left my life and loves behind me, and wish only to be blown about as the sea desires, to have the freedom of the open air, and be witness to the remaking of the world.

Originally published in Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, ed. Ian Whates (Solaris), 2013.

Collateral

Peter Watts

They got Becker out in eight minutes flat, left the bodies on the sand for whatever scavengers the Sixth Extinction hadn’t yet managed to kill off. Munsin hauled her into the Sikorsky and tried to yank the augments manually, right on the spot; Wingman swung and locked and went hot in the pants-pissing half-second before its threat-recognition macros, booted late to the party, calmed it down. Someone jammed the plug-in home between Becker’s shoulders; wireless gates unlocked in her head and Blanch, way up in the cockpit, put her prosthetics to sleep from a safe distance. The miniguns sagged on her shoulders like anesthetized limbs, threads of smoke still wafting from the barrels.

“Corporal.” Fingers snapped in her face. “Corporal, you with me?”

Becker blinked. “They— they were human . . . ” She thought they were, anyway. All she’d been able to see were the heat signatures: bright primary colors against the darkness. They’d started out with arms and legs but then they’d spread like dimming rainbows, like iridescent oil slicks.

Munson said nothing.

Abemama receded to stern, a strip of baked coral suffused in a glow of infrared: yesterday’s blackbodied sunshine bleeding back into the sky. Blanch hit a control and the halo vanished: night-eyes blinded, ears deafened to any wavelength past the range of human hearing, all senses crippled back down to flesh and blood.

The bearing, though. Before the darkness had closed in. It had seemed wrong.

“We’re not going to Bonriki?”

“We are,” the Sergeant said. “You’re going home. Rendezvous off Aranuka. We’re getting you out before this thing explodes.”

She could feel Blanch playing around in the back of her brain, draining the op logs from her head. She tried to access the stream but he’d locked her out. No telling what those machines were sucking out of her brain. No telling if any of it would still be there when he let her back in.

Not that it mattered. She wouldn’t have been able to scrub those images from her memory if she tried.

“They had to be hostiles,” she muttered. “How could they have just been there, I mean—what else could they be?” And then, a moment later: “Did any of them . . . ?”

“You wouldn’t be much of a superhuman killing machine if they had,” Okoro said from across the cabin. “They weren’t even armed.”

“Private Okoro,” the Sergeant said mildly. “Shut your fucking mouth.”

They were all sitting across the cabin from her, in defiance of optimal in-flight weight distribution: Okoro, Perry, Flannery, Cole. None of them augged yet. There weren’t enough Beckers to go around, one every three or four companies if the budget was up for it and the politics were hot enough. Becker was used to the bitching whenever the subject came up, everyone playing the hard-ass, rolling their eyes at the cosmic injustice that out of all of them it was the farmer’s daughter from fucking Red Deer who’d won the lottery. It had never really bothered her. For all their trash-talking bullshit, she’d never seen anything but good-natured envy in their eyes.

She wasn’t sure what she saw there now.

Eight thousand kilometers to Canadian airspace. Another four to Trenton. Fourteen hours total on the KC-500 the brass had managed to scrounge from the UN on short notice. It seemed like forty: every moment relentlessly awake, every moment its own tortured post-mortem. Becker would have given anything to be able to shut down for just a little while— to sleep through the dull endless roar of the turbofans, the infinitesimal brightening of the sky from black to grey to cheerful, mocking blue— but she didn’t have that kind of augmentation.

Blanch, an appendage of a different sort, kept her company on the way home. Usually he couldn’t go five minutes without poking around inside her, tweaking this inhibitor or that BCI, always trying to shave latency down by another millisecond or two. This time he just sat and stared at the deck, or out the window, or over at some buckled cargo strap clanking against the fuselage. The tacpad that pulled Becker’s strings sat dormant on his lap. Maybe he’d been told to keep his hands off, leave the crime scene in pristine condition for Forensic IT.

Maybe he just wasn’t in the mood.

“Shit happens, you know?”

Becker looked at him. “What?”

“We’re lucky something like this didn’t happen months ago. Half those fucking islands underwater, the rest tearing each other’s throats out for a couple dry hectares and a few transgenics. Not to mention the fucking Chinese just waiting for an excuse to help out.” Blanch snorted. “Guess you could call it peacekeeping. If you’ve got a really warped sense of humor.”

“I guess.”

“Shame we’re not Americans. They don’t even sign on to those treaties, do anything they damn well please.” Blanch snorted. “It may be a fascist shithole down there but at least they don’t knuckle under every time someone starts talking about war crimes.”

He was just trying to make her feel better, she knew.

“Fucking rules of engagement,” he grumbled.

Eight hours in IT when they landed: every aug tested to melting, every prosthetic stripped to the bolts while the meat attached to it sat silent and still and kept all the screams inside. They gave her four hours’ rack time even though her clockwork could scrub the fatigue right out of her blood, regulate adenosine and melatonin so precisely she wouldn’t even yawn right up until the point she dropped dead of heart failure. Might as well, they said: other schedules to clear anyway, other people to bring back across other oceans.

They told her not to worry. They told her it wasn’t her fault. They gave her propranolol to help her believe them.

Four hours, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling.

Now here she was: soul half a world away, body stuck in a windowless room paneled in oak on three sides, the fourth crawling with luminous maps and tacticals. Learning just what the enemy had been doing, besides sneaking up on a military cyborg in the middle of the fucking night.

“They were fishing,” the PAO told her.

“No,” Becker said; some subconscious subroutine added an automatic “sir”.

The JAG lawyer— Eisbach, that was it— shook her head. “They had longlines in their outriggers, Corporal. They had hooks, a bait pail. No weapons.”

The general in the background— from NDHQ in Ottawa, Becker gathered, although there’d been no formal introduction— studied the tacpad in his hand and said nothing at all.

She shook her head. “There aren’t any fish. Every reef in the WTP’s been acidified for twenty years.”

“It’s definitely a point we’ll be making,” Eisbach said. “You can’t fault the system for not recognizing profiles that aren’t even supposed to exist in the zone.”

“But how could they be—”

“Tradition, maybe.” The PAO shrugged. “Some kind of cultural thing. We’re checking with the local NGOs but so far none of them are accepting responsibility. Whatever they were doing, the UN never white-listed it.”

“They didn’t show on approach,” Becker remembered. “No visual, no sound— I mean, how could a couple of boats just sneak up like that? It had to be some kind of stealth tech, that must be what Wingman keyed— I mean, they were just there.” Why was this so hard? The augs were supposed keep her balanced, mix up just the right cocktail to keep her cool and crisp under the most lethal conditions.

Of course, the augs were also supposed to know unarmed civilians when they saw them . . .

The JAG was nodding. “Your mechanic. Specialist, uh . . . ”

“Blanch.” From the room’s only civilian, standing unobtrusively with the potted plants. Becker glanced over; he flashed her a brief and practiced smile.

“Specialist Blanch, yes. He suspects there was a systems failure of some kind.”

“I would never have fired if—” Meaning, of course, I would never have fired.

Don’t be such a pussy, Becker. Last month you took on a Kuan-Zhan with zero cover and zero backup, never even broke a sweat. Least you can do now is stand next to a fucking philodendron without going to pieces.

“Accidents happen in— these kind of situations,” The PAO admitted sadly. “Drones misidentify targets. Pillbox mistakes a civilian for an enemy combatant. No technology’s perfect. Sometimes it fails. It’s that simple.”

“Yes sir.” Dimming rainbows, bleeding into the night.

“So far the logs support Blanch’s interpretation. Might be a few days before we know for certain.”

“A few days we don’t have. Unfortunately.”

The general swept a finger across his tacpad. A muted newsfeed bloomed on the war wall behind him: House of Commons, live. Opposition members standing, declaiming, sitting. Administration MPs across the aisle, rising and falling in turn. A two-tiered array of lethargic whackamoles.

The General’s eyes stayed fixed on his pad. “Do you know what they’re talking about, Corporal?”

“No, sir.”

“They’re talking about you. Barely a day and a half since the incident and already they’re debating it in Question Period.”

“Did we—”

“We did not. There was a breach.”

He fell silent. Behind him, shell-shocked pols stammered silent and shifty-eyed against the onslaught of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The Minister of Defence’s seat, Becker noted, was empty.

“Do we know who, sir?”

The general shook his head. “Any number of people could have intercepted one or more of our communications. The number who’d be able to decrypt them is a lot smaller. I’d hate to think it was one of ours, but it’s not something we can rule out. Either way—” He took a breath. “—so much for our hopes of dealing with this internally.”

“Yes sir.”

Finally he raised his eyes to meet hers. “I want to assure you, Corporal, that nobody here has passed any judgment with regard to potential— culpability. We’ve reviewed the telemetry, the transcripts, the interviews; FIT’s still going over the results but so far there’s no evidence of any conscious wrong-doing on your part.”

Conscious, Becker noted dully. Not deliberate. Conscious. There’d been a time when the distinction would never have occurred to her.

“Be that as it may, we find ourselves forced to change strategy. In the wake of this leak it’s been decided we have to engage the public. Doubling down and invoking national security would only increase the appearance of guilt, and after that mess in the Philippines we can’t afford even a whiff of cover-up.” The general sighed. “This, at least, is the view of the Minister.”

“Yes sir.”

“It has therefore been decided— and I’m sorry to do this to you, I know it’s not what you signed up for— it’s been decided to get out in front of this thing, as they say. Control the narrative. Make you available for interviews, prove we have nothing to hide.”

“Interviews, sir?”

“You’ll be liaising with Mr. Monahan here.” On cue, the civilian stepped out of the background. “His firm’s proven useful in matters of— public outreach.”

“Ben. Just Ben.” Monahan reached out to shake with his right hand, offered his card with the left: Optic Nerve, twinkling above a stock-ticker crawl of client endorsements. “I know how much this sucks, Corporal. I’m guessing the last thing you want to hear right now is what some high-priced image consultant has to say about covering your ass. Is that about right?”

Becker swallowed, and nodded, and retrieved her hand. Phantom wings beat on her shoulders.

“The good news is: no ass-covering required. I’m not here to polish a turd— which is actually a nice change— I’m here to make sure the truth gets out. As you know, there’s no shortage of parties who are a lot less interested in what really happened than in pushing their own agendas.”

“I can understand that,” Becker said softly.

“This person, for example.” Just Ben tapped his watch and wiped Parliament from the wall; the woman revealed in its place stood maybe one-seventy, black, hair cropped almost army short. She seemed a little off-balance in the picture; doubtless the helmeted RCMP officer grabbing her left bicep had something to do with that. The two of them danced against a chorus line of protestors and pacification drones.

“Amal Sabrie,” Monahan was saying. “Free-lance journalist, well-regarded by the left for her human rights work. Somali by birth but immigrated to Canada as a child. Her home town was Beledweyne. Does that ring any bells, Corporal?”

Becker shook her head.

“Airborne Regiment? 1992?”

“Sorry. No.”

“Okay. Let’s just say she’s got more reason than most to mistrust the Canadian military.”

“The last person we’d expect to be on our side,” Eisbach remarked.

“Exactly.” Monahan nodded. “Which is why I’ve granted her an exclusive.”

They engaged on neutral territory, proposed by Sabrie, reluctantly approved by the chain of command: a café patio halfway up Toronto’s Layton Tower, overlooking Lakeshore. It jutted from the side of the building like a bracket fungus, well above most of the drone traffic.

An almost pathological empathy for victimhood. Monahan had inventoried Sabrie’s weak spots as if he’d been pulling the legs off a spider. Heart melts for stray cats, squirrels with cancer; blood boils for battered women and oppressed minorities and anyone who ever ended up on the wrong end of a shockprod. Not into performance rage, doesn’t waste any capital getting bent out of shape over random acts of microaggression. Smart enough to save herself for the big stuff. Which is why she still gets to soapbox on the prime feeds while the rest of the rabies brigade fights for space on the public microblogs.

Twenty floors below, pedestrians moved like ants. They’d never be life-sized to Becker; she’d arrived by the roof and she’d leave the same way, a concession to those who’d much rather have conducted this interview under more controlled conditions. Who’d much rather have avoided this interview entirely, for that matter. That they’d ceded so much control spoke volumes about Optic Nerve’s rep for damage control.

If we can just get her to see you as a victim— which is exactly what you are—we can turn her from agitator to cheerleader. Start off your appies as a tool of the patriarchy, you’ll be her soulmate by dessert.

Or maybe it spoke volumes about a situation so desperate that the optimum strategy consisted of gambling everything on a Hail Mary.

There she is Monahan murmured now, just inside her right temple, but Becker had already locked on: the target was dug in at a table next to the railing. This side, flower boxes and hors-d’oeuvres: that side, an eighty-meter plunge to certain death. Wingman, defanged but still untrusting, sent wary standbys to the stumps of amputated weaponry.

Amal Sabrie stood at her approach. “You look—” she began.

—like shit. Becker hadn’t slept in three days. It shouldn’t have shown; cyborgs don’t get tired.

“I mean,” Sabrie continued smoothly, “I thought the augments would be more conspicuous.”

Great wings, spreading from her shoulders and laying down the wrath of God. Corporal Nandita Becker, Angel of Death.

“They usually are. They come off.”

Neither extended a hand. They sat.

“I guess they’d have to. Unless you sleep standing up.” A thought seemed to occur to her. “You sleep, right?”

“I’m a cyborg, Ms. Sabrie. Not a vacuum cleaner.” An unexpected flicker of irritation, there; a bright spark on a vast dark plain. After all these flat waking hours Becker almost welcomed it.

Monahan didn’t. Too hostile. Dial it down.

Sabrie didn’t miss a beat. “A cyborg who can flip cars one-handed. If the promos are to be believed.”

Be friendly. give a little. don’t make her pull teeth.

Okay.

Becker turned in her seat, bent her neck so the journalist could glimpse the tip of the black enameled centipede bolted along her backbone. “Spinal and long-bone reinforcement to handle the extra weight. Wire-muscle overlays, store almost twenty Joules per cc.” There was almost a kind of comfort in rattling off the mindless specs. “Couples at over seventy percent under most—”

A little, Corporal.

“Anyway.” Becker shrugged, straightened. “Most of the stuff’s inside. The rest’s plug and play.” She took a breath, got down to it. “I should tell you up front I’m not authorized to talk about mission specifics.”

Sabrie shrugged. “I’m not here to ask about them. I want to talk about you.” She tapped her menu, entered an order for kruggets and a Rising Tide. “What’re you having?”

“Thanks. I’m not hungry.”

“Of course.” The reporter glanced up. “You do eat, though, right? You still have a digestive system?”

“Nah. They just plug me into the wall.” A smile to show she was kidding.

Now you’re getting it.

“Glad you can still make jokes,” Sabrie said from a face turned suddenly to stone.

Shit. Walked right into that one.

Down in the left hand, a tremor. Becker pulled her hands from the table, rested them on her lap.

“Okay,” Sabrie said at last. “Let’s get started. I have to say I’m surprised Special Forces even let me talk to you. The normal response in cases like this is to refuse comment, double down, wait for a celebrity overdose to move the spotlight.”

“I’m just following orders, ma’am.” The tic in Becker’s hand wouldn’t go away. She clasped her hands together, squeezed.

“So let’s talk about something you can speak to,” Sabrie said. “How do you feel?”

Becker blinked. “Excuse me?”

“About what happened. Your role in it. How do you feel?”

Be honest.

“I feel fucking awful,” she said, and barely kept her voice from cracking. “How am I supposed to feel?”

“Awful,” Sabrie admitted. She held silence for a respectable interval before pressing on. “The official story’s systems malfunction.”

“The investigation is ongoing,” Becker said softly.

“Still. That’s the word from sources. Your augments fired, you didn’t. No mens rea.”

Blobs of false color, spreading out against the sand.

“Do you feel like you killed them?”

Tell her the truth, Monahan whispered.

“I— part of me did. Maybe.”

“They say the augments don’t do anything you wouldn’t do yourself. They just do it faster.”

Six people on a fishing trip in an empty ocean. It didn’t make any fucking sense.

“Is that the way you understand it?” Sabrie pressed. “The brain decides what it’s going to do before it knows it’s decided?”

Becker forced herself to focus, managed a nod. Even that felt a bit shaky, although the journalist didn’t seem to notice. “Like a, a bubble rising from the bottom of a lake. We don’t see it until it breaks the surface. The augs see it—before.”

“How does that feel?”

“It feels like—” Becker hesitated.

Honesty, Corporal. You’re doing great.

“It’s like having a really good wingman sitting on your shoulder, watching your back. Taking out threats before you even see them. Except it’s using your own body to do that. Does that make sense?”

“As much as it can, maybe. To someone who isn’t augged themselves.” Sabrie essayed a little frown. “Is that how it felt with Tionee?”

“Who?”

“Tionee Anoka. Reesi Eterika. Io—” She stopped at something she saw in Becker’s face.

“I never knew,” Becker said after a moment.

“Their names?”

Becker nodded.

“I can send you the list.”

A waiter appeared, deposited a tumbler and a steaming platter of fluorescent red euphausiids in front of Sabrie; assessed the ambiance and retreated without a word.

“I didn’t—” Becker closed her eyes. “I mean yes, it felt the same. At first. There had to be a threat, right? Because the augs— because I fired. And I’d be dead at least four times over by now if I always waited until I knew what I was firing at.” She swallowed against the lump in her throat. “Only this time things started to—sink in afterward. Why didn’t I see them coming? Why weren’t the—”

Careful, Corporal. No tac.

“Some of them were still— moving. One of them was talking. Trying to.”

“To you?”

Up in ultraviolet, the textured glass of the table fractured the incident sunlight into tiny rainbows. “No idea.”

“What did they say?” Sabrie poked at her kruggets but didn’t eat.

Becker shook her head. “I don’t speak Kiribati.”

“All those augments and you don’t have realtime translation?”

“I—I never thought of that.”

“Maybe those smart machines saw the bubbles rising. Knew you wouldn’t want to know.”

She hadn’t thought of that either.

“So you feel awful,” Sabrie said. “What else?”

“What else am I feeling?” The tremor had spread to both hands.

“If it’s not too difficult.”

What the fuck is this he said I’d be steady he said the drugs—

“They gave me propranolol.” It was almost a whisper, and Becker wondered immediately if she’d crossed the line. But the voice in her head stayed silent.

Sabrie nodded. “For the PTSD.”

“I know how that sounds. It’s not like I was a victim or anything.” Becker stared at the table. “I don’t think it’s working.”

“It’s a common complaint, out there on the cutting edge. All those neurotransmitters, synthetic hormones. Too many interactions. Things don’t always work the way they’re supposed to.”

Monahan, you asshole. You’re the goddamn PR expert, you should’ve known I wasn’t up for this...

“I feel worse than awful.” Becker could barely hear her own voice. “I feel sick . . .”

Sabrie appraised her with black unblinking eyes.

“This may be bigger than an interview,” she said at last. “Do you think we could arrange a couple of follow-ups, maybe turn this into an in-depth profile piece?”

“I—I’d have to clear it with my superiors.”

Sabrie nodded. “Of course.”

Or maybe, Becker thought, you knew all along. As, two hundred fifty kilometers away, a tiny voice whooped in triumph.

They plugged her into an alternate universe where death came with an undo option. They ran her through scenarios and simulations, made her kill a hundred civilians a hundred different ways. They made her relive Kiribati again and again through her augments, for all the world as if she wasn’t already reliving it every time she closed her goddamn eyes.

It was all in her head, of course, even if it wasn’t all in her mind; a high-speed dialog between synapse and simulator, a multichannel exchange through a pipe as fat as any corpus callosum. A Monte-Carlo exercise in tactical brutality.

After the fourth session she opened her eyes and Blanch had disappeared; some neon red-head had replaced him while Becker had been racking up the kills. Tauchi, according to his name tag. She couldn’t see any augments but he glowed with smartwear in the Megahertz range.

“Jord’s on temporary reassignment,” he told her when she asked. “Tracking down the glitch.”

“But— but I thought this—”

“This is something else. Close your eyes.”

Sometimes she had to let innocent civilians die in order to save others. Sometimes she had to murder people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time: blocking a clean shot on a battlebot that was drawing down on a medical team, or innocently reaching for some control that had been hacked to ignite a tank of H2S half a city away. Sometimes Becker hesitated on those shots, held back in some forlorn hope that the target might move or change its mind. Sometimes, even lacking any alternative, she could barely bring herself to pull the trigger.

She wondered if maybe they were trying to toughen her up. Get her back in the saddle, desensitized through repetition, before her own remorse made her useless on the battlefield.

Sometimes there didn’t seem to be a right answer, no clear way to determine whose life should take priority; mixed groups of children and adults, victims in various states of injury and amputation. The choice between a brain-damaged child and its mother. Sometimes Becker was expected to kill with no hope of saving anyone; she took strange comfort in the stark simplicity of those old classics. Fuck this handwringing over the relative weights of human souls. Just point and shoot.

I am a camera, she thought.

“Who the hell makes up these scenarios?”

“Don’t like judgment calls, Corporal?”

“Not those ones.”

“Not much initiative.” Tauchi nodded approvingly. “Great on the follow-through, though.” He eyed his pad. “Hmmm. That might be why. Your cortisol’s fucked.”

“Can you fix that? I don’t think my augs have been working since I got back.”

“Flashbacks? Sweats? Vigilant immobility?”

Becker nodded. “I mean, aren’t the augs supposed to take care of all that?”

“Sure,” Tauchi told her. “You start to freak, they squirt you a nice hit of dopamine or leumorphin or whatever to level you out. Problem is, do that often enough and it stops working. Your brain grows more receptors to handle the extra medicine, so now you need more medicine to feed the extra receptors. Classic habituation response.”

“Oh.”

“If you’ve been feeling wobbly lately, that’s probably why. Killing those kids only pushed you over the threshold.”

God, she missed Blanch.

“Chemistry sets are just a band-aid anyway,” the tech rattled on. “I can tweak your settings to keep you out of the deep end for now, but longer-term we’ve got something better in mind.”

“A drug? They’ve already got me on—”

He shook his head. “Permanent fix. There’s surgery involved, but it’s no big deal. Not even any cutting.”

“When?” She could feel her insides crumbling. She imagined Wingman looking away, too good a soldier to be distracted by its own contempt. “When?”

Tauchi grinned. “Whaddya think we’re doing now?”

She felt stronger by the next encounter.

This time it went down at street level; different patio, different ambiance, same combatants. Collapsed parasols hung from pikes rising through the center of each table, ready to spread protective shade should the afternoon sun ever make it past the skyscrapers. Sabrie set down a smooth rounded disk— a half-scale chrome hockey puck— next to the shaft. She gave it a tap.

Becker’s BUD fuzzed around the edges with brief static; Wingman jumped to alert, hungry and limbless.

“For privacy,” Sabrie said. “You okay with that?”

White noise on the radio. Broad-spectrum visual still working, though. The EM halo radiating from Sabrie’s device was bright as a solar corona; her retinue of personal electronics glowed with dimmer light. Her watch. Her smartspecs, already recording; the faint nimbus of some medallion packed with circuitry, nestled out of sight between her breasts.

“Why now?” Becker asked. “Why not before?”

“First round’s on the house. I was amazed enough that they even cleared the interview. Didn’t want to push my luck.”

Wingman flashed an icon; a little judicious frequency-hopping would get around the jam. If they’d been in an actual combat situation it wouldn’t even be asking permission.

“You realize there are other ways to listen in,” Becker said.

(FHop?[y/n] FHop?[y/n] FHop?[y/n])

Sabrie shrugged. “Parabolic ear on a rooftop. Bounce a laser off the table and read the vibrations.” Her eyes flickered overhead. “Any one of those drones could be a lip-reader for all I know, and you know what? If all those eyes and ears can see the next Michael Harris before he draws down I’m actually okay with that.”

“Michael who?”

“Guy in Orlando? Shot up a daycare a few years back?”

“I must have been—” (FHop?[y/n])

(n)

“—wait, he shot up a daycare?”

“Whole new level of fucked-up, I know. Killed forty people across three generations before they took him out.”

“Why’d he do it?”

Sabrie fixed her with a look. “Why did you?”

Becker didn’t flinch. It took some effort.

“Malfunction.” She kept her voice carefully colorless. “As far as anyone can tell.”

“Same with Harris, probably.”

“He had augments?”

Sabrie shook her head. “Wiring can go just as bad when it’s made out of meat. Turns out he lost a sister himself, six months before, in another shooting. They say it tipped him over the edge.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“That shit never does. It’s what people say, though. They have to say something.” Something eased in her posture then, a subtle relaxation in the wake of some critical moment passed. “Anyway. I’m not one of those kneejerk privacy types, is what I’m saying. Sometimes the panopticon saves lives.”

“And yet.” Becker nodded at the device on the table.

“There are limits. The cameras are up there. Your bosses are literally inside your head.” She dipped her chin at the jammer. “Do you think they’ll object to you providing a few unprompted answers? Given this new apparent policy of transparency and accountability?”

“I don’t know,” Becker said.

“You know what would make them even more transparent and accountable? If they released the video for the night of the 25th. I keep asking, and they keep telling me there isn’t any.”

Becker shook her head. “There isn’t.”

“Come on.”

“Really. Too memory-intensive. “

“Corporal, I’m recording this,” Sabrie pointed out. “16K, Slooped sound, no compression even.” She glanced into the street. “Half those people are life-logging every second of their lives for the sheer narcissistic thrill of it.”

“And they’re streaming it. Or caching and dumping every couple of hours. I don’t get the luxury of tossing my cookies into some cloud whenever my cache fills up. I have to be able to operate in the dark for weeks at a time: you stream any kind of data in the field, it points back at you like a big neon arrow.

“Besides, budget time rolls around, how much of your limited R&D funding are you going to take away from tactical computing so you can make longer nature documentaries?” Becker raised her expresso in a small mock toast. “You think the People’s Republic is losing any sleep over that one?”

Which is awfully convenient, remarked a small voice, When you’ve just—

She shut it off.

Sabrie gave her a sidelong look. “You can’t record video.”

“Sure I can. But it’s discretionary. You document anything you think needs documenting, but the default realtime stream is just numbers. Pure black-box stuff.”

“You didn’t think you needed to document—”

“I didn’t know. It wasn’t conscious. Why the fuck can’t you people—”

Sabrie watched her without a word.

“Sorry,” Becker said at last.

“It’s okay,” Sabrie said softly. “Rising bubbles. I get it.”

Overhead, the sun peeked around an office tower. A lozenge of brightness crept onto the table.

“You know what they were doing out there?” Sabrie asked. “Tionee and his friends?”

Becker closed her eyes for a moment. “Some kind of fishing trip.”

“And you never wondered why anyone would go fishing in a place where there wasn’t anything to catch but slugs and slime?”

I never stopped wondering. “I heard it was a—cultural thing. Keep the traditions alive, in case someone ever builds a tuna that eats limestone.”

“It was an art project.”

Becker squinted as the hockey puck bounced sunlight into her eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Let me get that for you.” Sabrie half-rose and reached for the center of the table. The parasol bloomed with a snap. The table dropped back into eclipse.

“That’s better.” Sabrie reseated herself.

“An art project?” Becker repeated.

“They were college students. Cultural anthropology and art history majors, wired in from Evergreen State. Re-enact the daily lives of your forebears, play them back along wavelengths outside the human sensory range. They were calling it Through Alien Eyes. Some kind of commentary on outsider perspectives.”

“What wavelengths?”

“Reesi was glassing everything from radio to gamma.”

“There’s a third-party recording?”

“Nothing especially hi-def. They were on a student budget, after all. But it was good enough to pick out a signal around 400 Megahertz. Nobody can quite figure out what it is. Not civilian, anyway.”

“That whole area’s contested. Military traffic all over the place.”

“Yeah, well. The thing is, it was a just a couple of really short bursts. Half a second, maybe. Around eleven-forty-five.”

Wingman froze. Gooseflesh rippled up Becker’s spine.

Sabrie leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “That wouldn’t have been you, would it?”

“You know I can’t discuss operational details.”

“Mmmm.” Sabrie watched and waited.

“I take it you have this recording,” Becker said at last.

The journalist smiled faintly. “You know I can’t discuss operational details.”

“I’m not asking you to compromise your sources. It just seems— odd.”

“Because your guys would have been all over the bodies before they were even cool. So if anyone had that kind of evidence, it would be them.”

“Something like that.”

“Don’t worry, you don’t have a mole. Or at least if you do, they don’t report to me. You want to blame anyone, blame your wing man.”

“What?”

“Your preconscious triggers tie into some pretty high-caliber weaponry. I’m guessing I don’t have to tell you what kind of games physics plays when multiple slugs hit a body at twelve hundred meters a second.”

Momentum. Inertia. Force vectors transferred from small masses to larger ones— and maybe back to smaller ones again. A pair of smartspecs could have flown twenty meters or more, landed way up in the weeds or splashed down in the lagoon.

“We wouldn’t have even known to look,” Becker murmured.

“We did.” Sabrie sipped her drink. “Want to hear it?”

Becker sat absolutely still.

“I know the rules, Nandita. I’m not asking you to ID it, or even comment. I just thought you might like . . . ”

Becker glanced down at the jammer.

“I think we should leave that on.” Sabrie reached into her blouse, fingered the luminous medallion hanging from her neck. “You have sockets, though, right? Hard interfaces?”

“I don’t spread my legs in public.”

Sabrie’s eyes flickered to the far side of the street, where a small unmarked quadrocopter had just dipped into sight below the rim of the parasol. “Let’s talk about your family,” she said.

Monahan didn’t seem put out.

“We thought she might try something like that. Sabrie’s hardly in the tank. But you did great, Corporal.”

“You were monitoring?”

“Like we’d let some gizmo from the Sony Store cut us out of the loop? I could’ve even whispered sweet nothings in your ear if I’d had to— acoustic tightbeam, she’d never have had a clue unless she leaned over and nibbled your earlobe— but like I say, you were just fine.” Some small afterthought made him frown. “Would’ve been easier if you’d just authorized frequency hopping, of course . . . ”

“She had a lot of gizmos on her,” Becker said. “If one of them had been able to pick up the signal . . . ”

“Right. Good plan. Let her think it worked.”

“Yes sir.”

“Just Ben. Oh, one other thing . . . ”

Becker waited.

“We lost contact for just a few moments there. When the umbrella went up.”

“You didn’t miss much. Apparently the collateral was doing a school project of some kind. Art history. They weren’t actually fishing, it was more of a— a re-enactment, I guess.”

“Huh. Pretty much what we heard.” Monahan nodded. “Next time, might help if you went to active logging. You know, when we’re out of contact.”

“Right. Sorry. I didn’t think.”

“Don’t apologize. After what you’ve been through I’d be amazed if you didn’t make the occasional slip.”

He patted her on the back. Wingman bristled.

“I gotta prep for a thing. Keep up the great work.”

All those devil’s bargains and no-win scenarios. All those exercises that tore her up inside. Turned out they were part of the fix. They had to parameterize Becker’s remorse before they could burn it out of her.

It was a simple procedure, they assured her, a small part of the scheduled block upgrade. Seven deep-focus microwave bursts targeting the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Ten minutes, tops. Not so much as a scar to show for it afterward. She didn’t even need to sign anything.

They didn’t put her under. They turned her off.

Coming back online, she didn’t feel much different. The usual faint hum at the back of her skull as Wingman lit up and looked around; the usual tremors in fingers and toes, half-way between a reboot sequence and a voltage spike. The memory of her distant malfunction seemed a bit less intense, but then again things often seemed clearer after a good night’s sleep. Maybe she was just finally seeing things in perspective.

They plugged her into the simulator and worked her out.

Fifty-plus male, thirtysomething female, and a baby alone in a nursery: all spread out, all in mortal and immediate danger as the house they were trapped in burned down around them. She started with the female, went back to extract the male, was heading back in for the baby when the building collapsed. Two out of three, she thought. Not bad.

Sniper duty on some post-apocalyptic overpass, providing cover for an airbus parked a hundred meters down the road below, for the refugees running and hobbling and dragging themselves towards salvation. A Tumbleweed passing beneath: a self-propelled razorwire tangle of ONC and magnesium and white phosphorus, immune to bullets, hungry for body heat, rolling eagerly toward the unsuspecting evacuees. The engineer at Becker’s side— his face an obvious template, although the sim tagged him as her brother for some reason— labored to patch the damage to their vehicle, oblivious to the refugees and their imminent immolation.

Oblivious until Becker pitched him off the overpass and brought the Tumbleweed to rapture.

The next one was a golden oldie: the old man in the war zone, calling for some lost pet or child, blocking Becker’s shot as a battlefield robot halfway to the horizon took aim at a team of medics. She took out the old man with one bullet and no second thought; took out the bot with three more.

“Why’d you leave the baby for last?” Tauchi asked afterward, unhooking her. The light in his eyes was pure backwash from the retinal display, but he looked eager as a puppy just the same.

“Less of a loss,” Becker said.

“In terms of military potential?” They’d all been civilians; tactically, all last among equals.

Becker shook her head, tried to put instinct into words. “The adults would— suffer more.”

“Babies can’t suffer?”

“They can hurt. Physically. But no hopes or dreams, no memories even. They’re just— potential. No added value.”

Tauchi looked at her.

“What’s the big deal?” Becker asked. “It was an exercise.”

“You killed your brother,” he remarked.

“In a simulation. To save fifty civilians. I don’t even have a brother.”

“Would it surprise you to know that you took out the old man and the battlebot a full six hundred milliseconds faster than you did before the upgrade?”

She shrugged. “It was a repeat scenario. It’s not like I even got it wrong the first time.”

Tauchi glanced at his tacpad. “It didn’t bother you the second time.”

“So what are you saying? I’m some kind of sociopath now?”

“Exactly the opposite. You’ve been immunized against trolley paradoxes.”

“What?”

“Everybody talks about morality like it’s another word for right and wrong, when it’s really just a load of static on the same channel.” Tauchi’s head bobbed like a woodpecker. “We just cleaned up the signal. As of now, you’re probably the most ethical person on the planet.”

“Really.”

He walked it back, but not very far. “Well. You’re in the top thirty at least.”

Buried high above the streets of Toronto, cocooned in a windowless apartment retained as a home base for transient soldiers on missions of damage control: Nandita Becker, staring at the wall and watching the Web.

The wall was blank. The Web was in her head, invited through a back door in her temporal lobe. She and Wingman had spent altogether too much time alone in there, she’d decided. Time to have some company over.

The guest heads from Global’s Front View Mirror, for example: a JAG lawyer, a retired professor of military law from Dalhousie, a token lefty from Veterans for Accountable Government. Some specialist in cyborg tech she’d never met, on loan from the Ministry of Defense and obviously chosen as much for disarming good looks as for technical expertise. (Becker imagined Ben Monahan just out of camera range, pulling strings.) A generic moderator whose affect alternated between earnest sincerity and failed attempts at cuteness.

They were all talking about Becker. At least, she assumed they still were. She’d muted the audio five minutes in.

The medallion in her hand glowed like dim cobalt through the flesh of her fingers, a faint nimbus up at 3MHz. She contemplated the feel of the metal, the decorative filigree (a glyph from some Amazonian culture that hadn’t survived first contact, according to Sabrie), the hairline fracture of the interface port. The recessed Transmit button in its center: tap it once and it would squawk once, Sabrie had told her. Hold it down and it would broadcast on continuous loop.

She pressed it. Nothing happened.

Of course not. There’d be crypto. You didn’t broadcast anything in the field without at least feeding it through a pseudorandom timeseries synched to the mothership— you never knew when some friend of Amal Sabrie might be lurking in the weeds, waiting to snatch it from the air and take it home for leisurely dissection. The signal made sense only at the instant of its creation. If you missed it the first time, wanted to repeat it for the sake of clarity, you’d need a time machine.

Becker had built her own personal time machine that very afternoon, stuck it at #1 on speed-dial: a three-line macro to reset her system clock to a dark moment weeks in the past, just before her world had turned to shit.

She unmuted audio on the web feed. One of Global’s talking heads was opining that Becker was as much a victim as those poor envirogees her hijacked body had gunned down. Another spoke learnedly of the intimate connection between culpability andintent, of how blame— if that loaded term could even be applied in this case— must lie with the technology and not with those noble souls who daily put their lives on the line in the dangerous pestholes of a changing world.

“And yet this technology doesn’t decide anything on its own,” the moderator said. “It just does what the soldier’s already decided sub— er, preconsciously.”

“That’s a bit simplistic,” the specialist replied. “The system has access to a huge range of data that no unaugged soldier would ever be able to process in realtime— radio chatter, satellite telemetry, wide-spectrum visuals— so it’s actually taking that preconscious intent and modifying it based on what the soldier would do if she had access to all those facts.”

“So it guesses,” said the Man from VAG.

“It predicts.”

“And that doesn’t open the door to error?”

“It reduceserror. It optimizes human wisdom based on the maximum available information.”

“And yet in this case—”

Becker held down transmit and sacc’d speed-dial.

“— don’t want to go down that road,” the lawyer said. “No matter what the neurology says.”

Thirty-five seconds. Gone in an instant.

“Our whole legal system is predicated on the concept of free will. It’s the moral center of human existence.”

That was so much bullshit, Becker knew. She knew exactly where humanity’s moral center was. She’d looked it up not six hours ago: the place where the brain kept its empathy and compassion, its guilt and shame and remorse.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

“Suppose—” The moderator raised a finger. “—I get into a car with a disabled breathalyzer. I put it into manual and hit someone. Surely I bear some responsibility for the fact that I chose to drink and drive, even if I didn’t intend to hurt anyone.”

“That depends on whether you’d received a lawful command from a superior officer to get behind the wheel,” Ms. JAG countered.

“You’re saying a soldier can be ordered to become a cyborg?”

“How is that different from ordering a sniper to carry a rifle? How is it different from ordering soldiers to take antimalarial drugs— which have also, by the way, been associated with violent behavioral side-effects in the past— when we deploy them to the Amazon? A soldier is sworn to protect their country; they take that oath knowing the normal tools of their trade, knowing that technology advances. You don’t win a war by bringing knives to a gunfight—”

Speed-dial.

“—may not like cyborgs— and I’m the first to agree there are legitimate grounds for concern— but until you can talk the Chinese into turning back the clock on their technology, they’re by far the lesser evil.”

Twenty-eight seconds, that time.

“It’s not as though we ever lived in a world without collateral damage. You don’t shut down such a vital program over a tragic accident.”

A tragic accident. Even Becker had believed that. Right up until Sabrie had slipped her a medallion with a burst of radio static in its heart, a cryptic signal snatched from the warm Pacific night by a pair of smart-specs on a dead kid walking. A signal that was somehow able to offline her for intervals ranging from twenty to sixty-three seconds.

She wondered if there was any sort of pattern to that variability.

“Safeguards should be put into place at the very least.” The moderator was going for the middle road. “Ways to monitor these, these hybrids remotely, shut them down at the first sign of trouble.”

Becker snorted. Wingman didn’t take orders in the field, couldn’t even hear them. Sure, Becker could channel some smiley little spin doctor through her temporal, but he was just a peeping tom with no access to the motor systems. The actual metal didn’t even pack an on-board receiver; it was congenitally deaf to wireless commands until someone manually slotted the dorsal plug-in between Becker’s shoulders.

Deliberately design a combat unit that could be shut down by anyone who happened to hack the right codes? Who’d be that stupid?

And yet—

Transmit. Speed-dial.

“—are only a few on active duty— they won’t tell us exactly how many of course, say twenty or thirty. A couple dozen cyborgs who can’t be blamed if something goes wrong. And that’s just today. You wouldn’t believe how fast they’re ramping up production.”

Forty seconds. On the nose.

“Not only do I believe it, I encourage it. The world’s a tinderbox. Water wars, droughts, refugees everywhere you look. The threat of force is the only thing that’s kept a lid on things so far. Our need for a strong military is greater today than it’s ever been since the cold war, especially with the collapse of the US eco—”

Speed-dial.

“—and what happens when every pair of boots in the field has a machine reading its mind and pulling the trigger in their name? What happens to the very concept of a war crime when every massacre can be defined as an industrial accident?”

Thirty-two.

“You’re saying this Becker deliberately—”

“I’m saying nothing of the kind. I’m concerned. I’m concerned at the speed with which outrage over the massacre of civilians has turned into an outpouring of sympathy for the person who killed them, even from quarters you’d least expect. Have you seen the profile piece Amal Sabrie posted on the Star? It was almost a love letter.”

A shutdown command, radioed to a system with no radio.

“Nobody’s forgetting the victims here. But it’s no great mystery why people also feel a certain sympathy for Corporal Becker—”

Becker kept wondering who’d be able to pull off a trick like that. She kept coming up with the same answer.

“Of course. She’s sympathetic, she’s charismatic, she’s nice. Exemplary soldier, not the slightest smudge on her service record. She volunteered at a veterinary clinic back in high school.”

Someone with an interest in controlling the narrative.

“Chief of Defense couldn’t have a better poster girl if they’d planned—”

Dial.

“—should be up on charges is for the inquiry to decide.”

Forty-two seconds.

She wondered if she should be feeling something right now. Outrage. Violation. She’d thought the procedure was only supposed to cure her PTSD. It seemed to have worked on that score, anyway.

“Then let the inquiry decide. But we can’t allow this to become the precedent that tips over the Geneva Conventions.”

The other stuff, though. The compassion, the empathy, the guilt. The moral center. That seemed to be gone too. They’d burned it out of her like a tumor.

“The Conventions are a hundred years old. You don’t think they’re due for an overhaul?”

She still had her sense of right and wrong, at least.

Brain must keep that somewhere else.

“I thought they’d shipped you back to the WTP,” Sabrie remarked.

“This weekend.”

The journalist glanced around the grotto: low light, blue-shifted, private tables arrayed around a dance floor where partygoers writhed to bass beats that made it only faintly through the table damper. She glanced down at the Rising Tide Becker had ordered for her.

“I don’t fuck my interviews, Corporal. Especially ones who could snap my spine if they got carried away.”

Becker smiled back at her. “Not why we’re here.”

“Ohhhkay.”

“Bring your jammer?”

“Always.” Sabrie slapped the little device onto the table; welcome static fuzzed Becker’s peripherals.

“So why are we in a lekking lounge at 2a.m.?”

“No drones,” Becker said.

“None in the local Milestones either. Even during business hours.”

“Yeah. I just— I wanted a crowd to get lost in.”

“At two in the morning.”

“People have other things on their mind on the middle of the night.” Becker glanced up as a triplet stumbled past en route to the fuck-cubbies. “Less likely to notice someone they may have seen on the feeds.”

“Okay.”

“People don’t— congregate the way they used to, you know?” Becker sipped her scotch, set it down, stared at it. “Everyone telecommutes, everyone cocoons. Downtown’s so— thin, these days.”

Sabrie panned the room. “Not here.”

“Web don’t fuck. Not yet, anyway. Still gotta go out if you want to do anything more than whack off.”

“What’s on your mind, Nandita?”

“You got me thinking.”

“About?”

“The price of safety. The next Michael Harris. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

“I haven’t. I just don’t—”

“Twenty thousand gun-related deaths a year, Amal. Down there. Up here.”

“Mainly down there, thank God.” Sabrie said. “But yes.”

“And you got me thinking about how Harris had to be crazy to shoot up a daycare for chrissakes, how everyone said the death of his sister must have tipped him over the edge. Only . . . ”

“Only?” Sabrie echoed after the pause had stretched a bit too far.

“What if he wasn’t crazy?” Becker finished.

“How could he not be?”

“He lost his sister. Classic act of senseless violence. The whole gun culture, you know, the NRA has everyone by the balls and anyone so much as whispers about gun control gets shot down. So to speak.” Becker grunted. “Words haven’t worked. Advocacy hasn’t worked. The only thing that might possibly work would be something so unthinkable, so horrific and obscene and unspeakably evil, that not even the most strident gun nut could possibly object to— countermeasures.”

“Wait, you’re saying that someone in favor of gun control— someone who’d lost his sister to gun violence— would deliberately shoot up a daycare?”

Becker spread her hands.

“You’re saying he turned himself into a monster. Killed forty people. For what, a piece of legislation?”

“Weighed against thousands of deaths a year. Even if legislation only cut that by a few percent you’d make back your investment in a week or two.”

“Your investment?”

“Sacrifice, then.” Becker shrugged.

“Do you know how insane that sounds?”

“How do you know that’s not the way it went down?”

“Because nothing changed! No new laws got passed! They just wrote him off as another psycho.”

“He couldn’t know that up front. All he knew was, there was a chance. His life, a few others, for thousands. There was a chance.”

“I can’t believe that you, of all people, would— after what happened, after what you did—”

“Wasn’t me, remember? It was Wingman. That’s what everyone’s saying.” Wingman was awake now, straining at the leash with phantom limbs.

“But you were still part of it. You know that, Deet, you feel it. Even if it wasn’t your fault it still tears you up inside. I saw that the first time we spoke. You’re a good person, you’re a moral person, and—”

“Do you know what morality is, really?” Becker looked coolly into the other woman’s eyes. “It’s letting two stranger’s kids die so you can save one of your own. It’s thinking it makes some kind of difference if you look into someone’s eyes when you kill them. It’s squeamishness and cowardice and won’t someone think of the children. It’s not rational, Amal. It’s not even ethical.”

Sabrie had gone very quiet.

“Corporal,” she said when Becker had fallen silent, “what have they done to you?”

Becker took a breath. “Whatever they’re doing—”

 . . .couldn’t have a better poster girl if they’d planned it . . .

“—it ends here.”

Sabrie’s eyes went wide. Becker could see pieces behind them, fitting together at last. No drones. Dense crowd. No real security, just a few bouncers built of pitiful meat and bone . . .

“I’m sorry, Amal,” Becker said gently.

Sabrie lunged for the jammer. Becker snatched it up before the journalist’s hand had made it halfway.

“I can’t have people in my head right now.”

“Nandita.” Sabrie was almost whispering. “Don’t do this.”

“I like you, Amal. You’re good people. I’d leave you right out of it if I could, but you’re— smart. And you know me, a little. Maybe well enough to put it together, afterward . . . ”

Sabrie leapt up. Becker didn’t even rise from her chair. She seized the other woman’s wrist quick as a striking snake, effortlessly forced it back onto the table. Sabrie cried out. Dim blue dancers moved on the other side of the damper field, other things on their minds.

“You won’t get away with it. You can’t blame the machines for— “ Soft pleading words, urgent, rapid-fire. The false-color heatprint of the contusion spread out across Sabrie’s forearm like a dim rainbow, like a bright iridescent oil slick. “Please there’s no way they’ll be able to sell this as a malfunction no matter how—”

“That’s the whole point,” Becker said, and hoped there was a least a little sadness left in her smile. “You know that.”

Amal Sabrie. Number one of seventy-four.

It would have been so much faster to just spread her wings and raise arms. But her wings had been torn out by the roots, and lay twitching in the garage back at Trenton. The only arms she could raise were of flesh and blood and graphene.

It was enough, though. It was messy, but she got the job done. Because Corporal Nandita Becker was more than just a superhuman killing machine.

She was the most ethical person on the planet.

Originally published in Upgraded, edited by Neil Clarke, 2014.
This is a revised edition.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Mary Robinette Kowal (maryrobinettekowal.com)

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of The Glamourist Histories series of fantasy novels. She has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo awards, and the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her work has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. Stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies as well as in her collection Scenting the Dark and Other Stories from Subterranean.

Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson Pictures and founded Other Hand Productions. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve. She also records fiction for authors such as Kage Baker, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi.

Mary lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters.

Vandana Singh (vandana-writes.com)

Vandana Singh was born and raised in New Delhi, India. She acquired a passion for inventing her own myths around the age of eleven, and obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics in her twenties. She now teaches physics at a small state university near Boston, and obsesses over everything from human nature to climate change to creative pedagogies. Her short stories have appeared in The Other Half of the Sky, Solaris Rising 2, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and several other magazines and anthologies.

Peter Watts (rifters.com)

Peter Watts—author of Blindsight, Echopraxia, and the Rifters Trilogy, among other things—seems especially popular among people who don’t know him. At least, he wins most of his awards overseas except for a Hugo (won thanks to fan outrage over an altercation with Homeland Security) a Jackson (won thanks to fan sympathy over nearly dying from flesh-eating disease), and a couple of dick-ass Canadian awards you’ve probably never heard of. Blindsight is a core text for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology, despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires. Watts’s work is available in eighteen languages.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series will be published by Night Shade Books in June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.