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  She twitches at me but doesn’t respond.

  I get it. She’s lost. Confused. Scared. I feel the same way.

  I’m just better at lying to myself.

  Dub talks about the New Gladiators and his dream of attracting a sponsor and rising to the top of the rankings until it’s time for me to skip out on the post-meeting cookies, coffee and inane small talk.

  This is going to be even harder than I thought.

  StatUS-ID

  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [21:02:53. Thursday, January 16, 2059]

  Not only am I a disgraced cop and a suspected murderer hiding under an assumed name, but now the woman I supposedly started an affair with only weeks after my wife died has just informed me someone’s trying to steal my mind from out of my head.

  I need to stop answering the door.

  “Why? What’s in our heads that someone would want to steal?” I ask Doralai Wii, the woman who barged past me and made herself at home.

  “I don’t know.” Ms. Wii says from the couch.

  “Then who’s coming for us?” I ask, flashing back to Dub in a hulking skyn, trying to force a shyft into my head outside the restoration clinic.

  “I don’t know,” Ms. Wii says again, bends and wrings her hands around the clasp of her bag on the floor in front of her.

  How am I supposed to take her warning seriously? She may claim to know me, claim we had a plan to flee, but as far as I’m concerned, I just met her five minutes ago. I need more to go on.

  “You can’t show up here, announce my life is in danger and then say, ‘I don’t know,’ when I ask what direction I should be facing when it arrives.”

  Ms. Wii shakes her head, exasperated, and hefts her bag up beside her on the couch. “After you died, things got bad. Worse than bad—everything fell apart. The police questioned me, and then my husband, and when he found out what had been going on between us…” she lowers her head, fumbles with the zipper on her bag.

  My heart thumps in my ears.

  Uh-uh, not possible. No way I’d start something with her. I’d only just lost Connie. “What exactly do you mean, ‘going on with us?’”

  She glares up at me, anger flashing through her eyes. “We were in love. I was going to leave my husband.”

  A rivulet of sweat trickles between my shoulder blades. No way I’d betray Connie. “I don’t believe it.”

  She smirks and rolls her eyes, goes back to fiddling with her bag. “We were in pain and found solace in each other. We talked. I told you about my husband. He was trying but everything was different. He was treating me like a visiting distant relative, not his wife of sixty-two years. I was lonely. You told me about Connie. You were devastated. Must be devastated now.”

  My stomach flips. I told her about Connie? Why would I have shared anything about Connie with another woman?

  I don’t know what to believe anymore. I’m not sure I even want to hear the truth if this is what it’s going to sound like, but arguing with her isn’t going to get us anywhere. “Okay, for the sake of argument, we were together. What then?”

  “Elder disappeared.”

  “That counselling leader? What’s that got to do with someone wanting into our heads?”

  “I. Don’t. Know. But that’s what happened next.”

  “Where did he go?”

  She shrugs. “He didn’t show up to counselling one day. Just dropped right off the face of the Earth. Shelt took over and some new people joined, but it wasn’t the same. Then Miranda killed her ‘husband’, and Tala killed a bunch more people and someone linked them to the counselling group. The feeds were all over us and drove Carl back into storage. I bailed, hid in my apartment. Kept out of sight like you told me to. You’re telling me you didn’t know all that was going to happen?”

  “I don’t even know those people.”

  “Shit,” she says, gives the zipper a hefty yank and pulls it open. After a few seconds of furious digging, she grumbles and dumps the contents on the floor in front of her. Piles up clothes, energy bars, loose cashcards, a black datastick, a small gun, until she finds what she’s looking for—a shyft. She holds it up, watches the pink dust sparkle inside and then presses it to the thin cuff I hadn’t noticed on the back of her neck.

  Her shoulders sag and her eyes roll up.

  “Ms. Wii?”

  She doesn’t answer, lost in space.

  “DORALAI?”

  She snaps her head up, tries to focus her eyes on me. “You used to call me Dora,” she slurs.

  “What was in that?” I ask, looking at the cylinder in her hand.

  She holds the spent shyft up as though she’d forgotten it was still in her fingers. The pink dust is gone, it now looks like a burned-out light bulb. The mind-altering code that it used to contain is now sloshing around in her Cortex. “Oh this? Just a Bliss. It’s been rough and—oh, do you want one? I have more. You used to like them.”

  I used to shyft? Pollute my brain with that crap?

  Caused someone to want to yank my mind out of my head?

  Planned to run away with a stranger only weeks after my wife’s death to avoid a murder charge by engineering my own secret restoration?

  Who had I become?

  I shake my head. “I’m good.”

  “Suit yourself,” she purrs. Then regards me with a sly smile. “You’re sure you don’t want to fuck?”

  “Ms. Wii,” I say. “I don’t know you.”

  She rolls up her eyes, twiddles her head. “I told you to call me Dora…”

  I need to keep her on task. “You think someone’s after you—someone already came after me, someone you know. Ari Dubecki.”

  Her hand flies to her mouth. She asks, “Are you sure?” through her fingers.

  I nod.

  She blinks once, then looks down at her scattered belongings, a panic rising in her. “It could be anyone,” she says, drops to her knees and starts refilling her bag.

  I reach out and touch her shoulder and she jumps, spins with her gun pointed at me.

  “It could be you,” she says, and pulls her bag closed with one hand, keeping the gun on me with the other. She struggles to her feet, wobbles on her ankles like a newborn deer, backs toward the door with the gun raised.

  I stay seated. Keep my hands where she can see them. I may not know her, but I’m responsible for her. I can’t just let her take off into the night.

  “Dora, I swear to you, I’m not trying to hurt you. I may not be who you were expecting, but if someone’s after us I’m just as interested in finding out what’s going on as you are.”

  “I don’t care what’s going on,” she says, but she lowers the gun. “I just want to get the hell away from here.”

  “Where would you go?”

  She shakes her head. “I’ll figure it out.”

  “Do you have money?”

  “Some.”

  “Enough to last the rest of your life?”

  She shakes her head again but stops her retreat, leans against the kitchen counter.

  “If we run, we’ll be looking over our shoulders forever,” I tell her.

  “That’s the exact opposite of what you said last time.”

  I take a breath. “I don’t know what I said before. I only know now.”

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  “We figure out what’s going on.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “Start at the beginning.”

  She purses her mouth, cocks her head at me. “What does that mean?”

  “If we figure out who had me restored this time, maybe we’ll find who’s after us.”

  “Wait—it wasn’t you?” she asks, her face incredulous. “You said before you left that day, that you had a plan, to keep out of sight and wait for you. That’s why I was hiding. I had my IMP watching for you to come back.”

  “Watching for Gibson?”

  “That’s what you said.”
/>   “What was I planning?”

  “You wouldn’t tell me,” she says, anger creeping back into her voice. “We fought. That was the last time I saw you.”

  “What did we fight about?”

  “You were going to do something stupid.”

  Like get myself killed. I was under investigation. My rep was ruined. Death was the only way out.

  “Why don’t you lie down, let that shit clear out of your head,” I say.

  “I don’t want to lie down, I want to—” my tab chirps, interrupting her. It’s the alert I set up for rep-hits on the remaining people from Restoration Counselling, and since Dora’s beside me, it must be something on Dub or Elder.

  The IMP has aggregated a dozen feed headlines. Two more pop up as I’m scanning them.

  It isn’t Elder. Dub’s dead.

  His skyn was found lying across the tracks on a railway trestle over the Rouge River, his Cortex obliterated. They’re calling it a suicide.

  My head spins. I don’t know if I should feel bad because he used to be a friend or happy because he just attacked me and now my parents will be safe.

  Either way, I need to find out what happened. To Dub. And to me.

  “I have to go,” I say. “Stay here. You’ll be safe.”

  Dora’s eyes widen and she shakes her head. “No way.”

  “They found Dub,” I say.

  Her face twitches. Half shock, half fear. “Where? Did he say anything?”

  “He’s dead.”

  She blinks once, then again, like her brain has stalled, like even after all she’s been through, this is too much to process.

  “How—”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I have to.”

  “But why? Dub attacked you.”

  “Exactly. And if what you’re saying is true and someone is after something in our heads, I’m not going to find out who’s behind it by hiding here.” I step past her, stop at the door. “Lock it after me. Don’t let anyone in.”

  “No,” she says, gathering up her bag. “If you’re not staying here, neither am I. I’m not going to let you disappear on me again.”

  I consider arguing but can’t bring myself to summon the energy so she follows me out, bag clutched to her chest like a newborn.

  StatUS-ID

  [a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]

  SysDate

  [20:56:51. Friday, April 12, 2058]

  I exit counselling into brisk night air, relieved to lose myself in the anonymous buzz of the city. I’m only wearing my suit jacket, but after an hour and a half sitting on that hard chair, I want to stretch my legs. Besides, a little cold never hurt anyone.

  Queen Street’s Friday nightlife is perking up. It’s early, the normals are out window shopping in the art galleries and mod shops that line the strip. But Queen Street’s still where the freaks come to play, even as their natural habitat gets pushed further and further toward Hamilton, and the streets will soon be thick with the kind of people who get ready to go out by choosing the perfect thong to show off their whole-body photoos.

  I’m crossing Dufferin Ave., about to pass under the raised commuter tracks when the sounds of whining mosquitos and outraged sirens rise behind me. I turn and a wave of Lowboys on Weelz—gyro-stabilized seats bolted to single, high-torque racing wheels—crests over me. They ride hunched over, bowed way forward to coax as much speed as possible, leaning hard to turn, relying on technology and delusions of immortality to keep them alive as they swerve to smash car mirrors and knock over pedestrians.

  I consider sticking my arm out and clotheslining one of the twerps but instead pull my arms in to let the kids pass, stay still as two Constables in spindly-legged power shells gallop by, racing through the swerving cars and Skütes in full-on pursuit-mode. Going hard after the kids. The punks must have pissed someone important off.

  Above, two more constables in single-seat hoppers follow from the sky, their sirens wailing, spotlights tracking, lightbars coruscating from blue to white to red. Powerful quad turbines kick up road grit as the pilots pull over the raised tracks ahead of them, following the action.

  A swarm of drones accompanies the whole mess, buzzing overhead, down under the bridge. Gotta be a half-dozen of them, recording everything.

  Then the sudden show’s over. There’s a beat of silence and the street returns to its normal, low-level hum.

  I brush the dirt from my hair and at the next intersection cut down to King where I’m less likely to get run down on the sidewalk or have my eye poked out by an asshole with a decorative cranial spike.

  I put my head down and concentrate on walking. A half-hour later, I’m already through downtown, almost back to the apartment. The tension that’s knotted my gut since that message popped up has loosened, and my head is clearer. It starts working on the gaps in everything I’ve learned. The things that make no sense.

  I’ve exhausted every source of information I have access to, the open link, SecNet, the Service AMP. There’s only one more place I have left to scour: the Undernet. Crazies and conspiracy theorists spouting their nonsense on darksites are all I have left.

  Too bad it’s the one place I can’t go. Not as myself, anyway. My rep’s too good, too tied to the Service to get so much as a foot in the door. They’ll smell me coming before I even hit their sites and have the doors locked when I arrive. And this side of a court order, there’s nothing I can do about it.

  I need to be someone else.

  Then it hits me. I know just the person. I’d forgotten all about him.

  Finsbury Gage’s StatUS is an open dox. A soldier. A cop. A taxpayer and all-round good citizen. But G1bZ0n—Gage Gibson—he’s a smear on SecNet, hard to chart. Most people, with the amount of information available on them, SecNet’s 99% on what they’ll have for breakfast.

  SecNet’s only 50/50 Gibson’s even human.

  The Gibson ID was a facade. A way to keep my name clear from things I didn’t want following me around for the rest of my life. It’s got no ties to me, no ties to the Service. Rep should still be good, but not too good. The Inspector won’t know. The AMP won’t know.

  And most importantly, the low-reps won’t see a cop. Just another random schlub on the link.

  I pull the tab off my wrist, stretch it out full width and keeping one eye out for obstacles as I walk, log as G1bZ0n. Even after all these years, I still remember the password.

  My IMP goes away and my tab reloads with the apps and feeds I’d last used more than fifteen years ago, half of them out of date and unavailable. Gibson doesn’t have any linktime available so I have to log out and relog as myself, buy some time and play a few tricks to transfer it without creating any ties, but once that’s done I’m set. I throw up a privacy screen and dive into those conspiracy feeds I’d stumbled across last night, using a search on xYvYx to get me started.

  Not being tied to my sterling rep opens things, but only slightly. The Undernet is insular, protective. Paranoid even. Which, I suppose if you believed some of the things they do—like that the link is swarming with ghosts of the first digital humans, or that it’s becoming sentient, or that it can see the future—a healthy paranoia would be part of simple common sense.

  After a few minutes poking around in an unknown world that I’m still mostly barred from seeing, I figure I should go to the man in-charge for an invitation and compose a message for xYvYx, telling him in vague terms about the threatening message I’d received. The missing routing. The possibility it messed with an AMP’s logic. And ask if he’d ever heard anything like it.

  This is all I have left. My last lead.

  If I come up cold here, my investigation will be as stuck as the rest of the Service’s is. I’ll never find him. Never get justice for Connie.

  Now all I can do is wait and hope for something to come back.

  ***

  SysDate

  [22:04:35. Friday, April 12, 2058] />
  By the time I send the message to xYvYx, I’m back at the apartment. A large package waits for me at the concierge and I hold it under my arm as I ride the elevator up to my floor. It’ll be the case of tomato soup I ordered.

  I’d only been on base in Africa for a week when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to stomach the bag-nasty chow. I got abdominal pains whenever I ate something more substantial than a protein bar. I never managed to figure out why, possibly some local ingredient that didn’t sit well with me, but more likely a psychosomatic disorder resulting from the stress of being away from home for the first time in my life.

  I needed to eat something, so I spent a good portion of my take-home ordering food from home in bulk, specifically cases of tomato soup—the kind I used to make myself for dinner as a teenager on those nights when Mom was pulling a double at the hospital and Dad was locked in his study. I lived on canned tomato soup for my entire tour and well into my stint at SinoPharm. Until we got back home and Connie cajoled me into expanding my culinary horizons.

  I haven’t been hungry since the restoration, but even a lab-grown body needs food, so tomato soup it is. And it’s easier to buy a case at a time than make a trip to the store every other day.

  The elevator lets me off on my floor and the apartment door unlatches as I push it open. The lights rise as I enter. I set the package on the small kitchen counter, peel the adhesive back, unfold the package, grab a can, ignite the warmer and sit it down to heat next to the empties from yesterday and the day before that. While I wait I absently empty my pockets and set the contents on the counter.

  If Connie was here, I’d have taken the time to transfer the soup into a pot on the stove, added a dollop of butter and some dried oregano, made some toast, and sat a bowl beside wherever it was she’d become engrossed in a journal or lost in reviewing her research. And there it would have sat cooling until she looked up however many hours later, noticed she was hungry and ate without putting down her tab. But I’m alone, so the heater tab’ll do.