

Nina's World

Mike and EZ

Copyright 2017 Mike and EZ

Smashwords Edition

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters in it (human, android or otherwise), are completely imaginary.

PART I

THE REACHES

The road to nowhere. That's what it was known by. Of course, all roads lead some place, and the Kamakira Expressway was no different. It got its name from a series of unfortunate accidents that happened during the course of its construction, none of which have been completely explained to this day. The superstitious locals avoided using the Expressway altogether, and even the mention of its name brought a stall to any friendly conversation. Not that there were too many locals around this area, anyway - the town of Kamakira was, officially speaking, deserted, and no one sane enough would go here, especially not at night.

Standing on top of the running highway, Mike scanned the floor of the valley with his remaining good eye for any signs of life. His attention was directed at the few rusted roofs of the abandoned shanty town in the mouth of the river valley below. It was late in the day, and the sun was beating down on the reddish, corrugated metal houses. Weakly, they glinted back the sun. The little town seemed lifeless, deserted. He had heard various tales about the area and the ghost town of Kamakira itself. None of them seemed true. Out of the corner of his bad eye, Mike saw a few Greyskins scurrying around in one of the shanty town's dilapidated streets. They were small, hairless rat-like things that could usually be found rummaging through the plentiful garbage around the Metro. It was strange to see them here in broad daylight, running freely through the streets. The Greyskins seemed to be attracted to one particular intersection, which was almost completely blocked by a collapsed two story shanty. A good part of its metal roof lay strewn about in sheets all over the sidewalk, and the Greyskins took cover under them as they approached. There was a small pack of them now, maybe twenty in all. They gathered for a moment around the ruins, then suddenly sprang back and scattered in different directions, disappearing below the corrugated sheets. Even from a distance, Mike could feel the trembling hot air against his face like a wave. The metal gave off a lot of heat. Only those weird creatures could live in a place like that, Mike thought, gradually zooming out of the intersection to get a better view of the whole town. The valley was home to a riverbed, currently dry. Some clumps of grass grew about its edges, forming dark, patched bands. The vacant riverbed snaked its way through a good part of the valley before disappearing in a small patch of curly, dark trees. Mike zoomed in on a white object at the mouth of the dead river: it was a cow skull. He spat out his cigarette.

He was waiting for the tram. He had been waiting for a good four hours now and was about to give up when EZ called him. EZ's voice came through Mike's headset in echoes, and it was difficult to understand what he was saying.

"Mike-ike-ike? What's the holdup-oldup-oldup?" EZ's voice asked, reverberating. "I dunno. I'll go down there and see," Mike replied. "Be careful-areful-areful.""There's no one down there. They say it's deserted.""Be careful anyway," EZ said, and his voice fell silent among the echoes.

Well, not that deserted, Mike thought as he walked down the street. As soon as he got down into the valley, he noticed several things that were downright contrary to everything he'd ever heard about Kamakira's Ghost Town: the place was far from uninhabited. It was empty here, yes, but he could sense them from a mile away. This was the home of the Dolls. Even though most of them were hiding now behind the blind shutters of their houses, they laughed faintly when they saw him walk by. Mike looked up from time to time, scanning the windows, but there was no one in sight. Faded, yellowing curtains covered most of the jalousies, many of them broken; sometimes the holes were patched up with different pieces of cardboard or just stuffed with rags. The Dolls weren't dangerous by themselves.

It was hot out in the streets. Above the corrugated metal roofs of the houses, the air stood still. The town was an oven. Just ahead, the sidewalks shimmered, bending up and down in the mirage.

Mike checked the address and looked around: a strange, small figure was hobbling toward him from across the street. It was hunched over and it resembled a small, old man, but it was clipping across the empty intersection at an amazing speed. The little man was clearly heading toward Mike, but for some reason, stopped short on the other side of the street and leaned casually against a lamp post. Mike's buzzer suddenly went off again. It was EZ.

"Mike? Mike?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, good. Listen, we had a minor problem with the tram - it's stuck on its way to Port. Did you speak with Marley?"

"No, I can't find the house. I think I've got the wrong address, I'm trying to track it."

"How long do you think it's gonna take?"

"A couple hours."

"Any trouble?"

"No. There's nobody here," Mike said, giving the man across the street a brief look.

"Ok, let's reconnect back at the Port in three hours, is that okay?"

"Sure," Mike said.

As soon as the line went out, the little man began moving toward Mike again. He was about three or four feet tall at the most. He walked very slowly now, wobbling uncertainly with each step, as if the ground he was walking on was made of Jell-O. He was wearing a dark suit and an old-fashioned straw hat, the top of which was missing. When he was about seven feet away, he suddenly stopped and tipped his hat obnoxiously to Mike. The little man was grinning, and Mike could see most of his teeth, sharp and angular, like those of a shark. A few were missing.

"Howdy," the small man said, stepping closer.

"What do you want?"

"You shouldn't be here. Get out."

"Why?"

"We don't need any outsiders."

"Listen, I'm looking for someone, know where this address is?" Mike began taking out the scrap with the address, when the small man moved closer. The toothy grin had gone from his face.

"You deaf, or what? I said get out!"

"You with the police?"

"No, but that's my territory. You got no business here, and we don't want any grey faced, wired up freaks around here starting any trouble." The small man was serious: in his hand, Mike noticed the neon flash of a zapper gun.

"Now get outta here, you ugly sonuvabitch."

"I hate to break it to you, buddy, but you're one ugly..."

The little man could, for all his apparent slowness and negligible height, jump very high. He jumped off the ground so quickly Mike didn't have time to respond and got knocked out cold. On the ground, little bits of red glass were all that remained of Mike's only good eye.

When he awoke, he was still lying on the dirty concrete pavement. There was no one around, and some of his equipment was gone, including the headset, but it was no big deal - Mike could still use his inbuilt station. His right eye was smarting, but he was otherwise unharmed.

It was almost dark now. Mike guessed he must have been out for about two hours. A stoplight, that had stopped working properly, illuminated a large section of the street in jolts of blue light. Mike tucked the loose wiring back behind his eye panel and looked around. Further down, on the opposite side of the street, he saw a Doll moving toward him. She was lit up intermittently by the flashing stoplight, her heels clicking rhythmically as she walked. She was dressed in the barest minimum, her waist crossed by a wide black belt. The Doll paused for a moment on the other side to look at him. She smiled, but when Mike started to get up, fled into the nearest alley. It was eerily silent. Mike consulted the map. The slip of paper with the address was missing. He began walking back.

From time to time, Mike felt sure that there was someone following him, but when he looked around, there was no one in sight. His register told him it was Jumpers, about five of them, in fact, and he quickened his pace. It would be good to get out of Kamakira before it got completely dark. Ghosts did not bother Mike at all now: he would have gladly preferred them anytime to a stray Doll or one of those crazy, grinning Jumpers.

His right eye was playing tricks on him; from one moment to the next, he saw everything breaking up into kaleidoscopic pieces, then rearranging itself and drifting back together again. The sky floated in six different segments among dark pools of buildings and littered sections of street. The dark blocks swam around, mixing with the smaller, colorful pieces of stoplights and shop signs, multiplying, drifting, spinning, dividing. At last, Mike just shut it off: it kept him from thinking.

About a half hour later, Mike received a call, which was now coming in through his inbuilt receiver. The echoes moved inside his head.

"Mike?" EZ's voice said. He sounded worried.

"Yeah?"

"Where the hell are you?"

"Uh, I'm almost there. What's happened with the tram?"

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, what happened?"

"Well... we're fucked. The tram was carrying oranges."

"What?! Oranges?"

"Yeah. You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm all right."

"You sound a little... strange."

"It's the Reaches, EZ, you start getting like that here in no time. Get me out now, will ya? It's getting dark."

"Gimme an hour, I'll be there," EZ said, and the line went out.

"Who did that?" EZ asked, while they were driving past a gigantic billboard of flashing white lights, which advertised some kind of mouthwash.

"One of those little bastards. I never see them coming," Mike said, rubbing his temple."But they say the town's deserted," EZ ventured.

"Deserted, my ass. It's full of these little creeps. They only look slow, until they see you. Then they jump like a goddamn rabid grasshopper." Mike looked out the window of the taxi: they were still on the outskirts of the city, judging by the amount of garbage lying right on the road, and sometimes partially blocking it. The taxicab's engine strained and groaned as it climbed like a dung beetle through the dirty pile-ups.

"Let's see if we can fix you up tonight."

"I ain't counting on Doc, if that's what you're planning."

"No, I know someone who's good. Doc won't do here."

SNADE

The new practitioner, Snade by name, was not much better than old Doc was, but he had a collection of spare parts, one of which fit Mike's eye perfectly. In about an hour, the kaleidoscopic show in his right eye had ceased, and Mike could see even better than before. Snade only accepted hard cash as payment. His other business was of a completely different nature: Snade was a psychic reader, or, as he liked to call himself, a mystic. His establishment was located on the second floor of a little house permanently embedded between two dismal skyscrapers, both of which rose to fifty stories on either side, casting the little house in perpetual shadow. Right above the entrance, a bright neon inscription read, "Snade-Mystic. Psychic. Fortune Teller. Now accepting all forms of currency. Come in."

"Say, Snade," EZ ventured, after the payment was complete. "What's it like, seeing the future and all?"

Snade looked up at EZ, his orange dreadlocks falling all over his shoulders in disarray. He had bright green eyes. On the table before him stood a classic crystal ball; also green. Smoky shadows moved inside it, circling the sphere.

"You want to see the future?" Snade asked, and shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

"No, not really," EZ said.

"Then why do you ask?" Snade moved the crystal ball aside.

"No reason, but if you really can see the future, what good does it do you?"Snade frowned, then smiled, then frowned again. One corner of his mouth began to twitch. "It's not like that. And that's... that's none of your business," he said, running his hand over his mouth. "For your information, I can't see my own future. It's not like that. It's not like that at all, but I can see other things. For a limited time, I can offer you a reading at no charge."

"EZ, what the hell are you doing?" Mike said, but EZ was already sitting at the table across from Snade. Snade closed his eyes solemnly and waved his hand over the green crystal ball. His mouth continued to twitch.

"I see..." he began, but a sudden knocking on the back entrance door interrupted him. "Who is it?" he asked.

"Davy? Davy?" an old woman's voice called him.

"Yes, Ma?"

"Who's there?" The door opened a trifle, but it was too dark to see inside the room.

"Nobody."

"Come upstairs," the voice said, and the door closed again creakily, as if on its own.Snade brushed back the dreadlocks from his face.

"If you'll excuse me, gentlemen, I have to get going, but if you ever need your eyes fixed, or your futures foretold, come back again at any time." Snade got up from the table. "Also, watch out for the Doll."

"What Doll?" EZ asked, but Snade didn't answer. He went out the back door listlessly, forgetting to lock it behind him.

BOSS

Why is it always like this? Mike thought, as they were taking the taxi out of the Reaches. The taxi was old, and even though the road was evenly paved in most places, the cab jolted them up and down at every turn.

"Because," replied EZ, who could hear his twin brother's thoughts, "we have no luck, that's all. It's not anybody's fault or anything," he concluded.

"Does boss know yet?" Mike asked, holding onto the front seat, as another jolt shook them around the cabin.

"N-no." EZ looked out the window. The quickly passing rounded tops of the Metrodome went by one by one, the towers of its multiple satellite receivers flashing like upside down golden cupolas. In some places, EZ could see the missing sections of roof from the previous attack. They looked like black, broken gaps in the smooth gilded surface. The domes were big and had complacently withstood multiple air raids, bombs and rockets, as well as falling pieces of space junk. They had even survived the First Great War. The latest case was a strange one. It was a freak attack, but most likely a simple accident. Still, the operators of the craft that crashed into the Metrodome were drones, and ever since the investigation began, Mike and EZ had no rest. Any minute, they expected to be brought in and questioned by the police, because they were drones themselves. EZ and Mike were almost identical in appearance, but Mike was a bit bigger. He also liked to smoke, but EZ didn't. EZ considered it a human habit too outdated and, perhaps, unworthy of himself.

Mike's right eye was working fine now, and he could see the streets out of his side of the cab as they drove into the outer parts of the Reaches. It was getting cleaner, brighter, and more up-kept the further they drove away from that particular area of the Metro's periphery. It was also less dangerous here. There were no Jumpers or Dolls. Mike looked over at EZ, who was trying to sleep with his head leaned back against the headrest, but the jolting of the cab prevented him from staying in the same position for long. He wanted to ask him about the oranges and what happened with the tram. EZ knew that, but he didn't feel like discussing it yet.

When they got to Boss's place, it was about seven in the evening. A small man who reminded Mike of the Jumper who had attacked him earlier that afternoon greeted them and led them into the lobby. The lobby was covered in mirrors from floor to ceiling: round ones, square ones, octagonal, even triangular ones - tall ones, short ones, all kinds of mirrors occupied every space of the walls. Most were framed and, at first glance, resembled portraits. Boss made them wait an hour, a bad sign. Mike was getting nervous, but he couldn't smoke here or step outside. To make matters worse, it began to rain. The warm rain drizzled mildly outside the window, turning everything into a grey, non-decipherable mist, and soon Mike lost his desire to smoke. He leaned back against the gaudy love seat and just wished that he could get out of the boss's office with minimal damages from Boss and the surrounding moisture outside.

Finally, the door opened and the small man motioned for them to come inside. EZ got up first.When they entered, their boss was lying on the sofa. A black towel covered his face. The small man served him opium through a copper thinner, a small pipe with a long, thin crystal stem. Boss was in bad shape, which meant things weren't going well. The accident with the tram did not help.

"So," he said, and tipped back one corner of the black towel to look at them with one eye. It was pale orange and overwhelmingly blood shot. Mike and EZ stood nearby, not daring to come any closer: Boss had a reputation.

"Sir," EZ began, "it was an accident."

"So I hear." Boss scratched his left ear with one finger. "What happened?"

A trick question. Everyone knew what happened, or, at least, that was the way it looked: the tram, which was supposedly transporting prisoners to Kansas City, had stopped on its way before reaching Port Stella Maris. At first, there was a simple mechanical problem. By the time it was fixed, the tram had lost half its fuel before anyone noticed the large dent in its tank.

"It must've been a mistake with the carrier," Mike ventured.

"Very likely," EZ added.Suddenly, their boss stirred into an upright position on the couch. The black towel had fallen off his face and was now lying across his lap. He sat like this for a while, rubbing his eyes. He had an unhealthy, mean sort of thinness about him that was gradually being worsened by his smoking habit. Blindly, with one hand, he reached for the opium pipe on the table, but it rolled away from him and fell to the floor.

"Ugh," he sighed. "You two are the most incompetent shitheads I've ever met."Mike and EZ shifted uncomfortably in place at the compliment. They were both reflected in the large oval mirror above the couch. EZ's face was glowing red.

"Why don't you just admit that you've got the wrong train?"

"We didn't know," EZ began, "the carrier told us..."

"The carrier is not in question here. You are." Boss sat up a bit more. He loosened his shirt collar and dragged briefly on the pipe, which he had retrieved from the floor. "That train was carrying oranges. You stopped a train that was carrying goddamn oranges! Why didn't you check with Marley first?"

"I couldn't find him," Mike mumbled. "They gave me the wrong address."

"Get out," boss said, and lay down again on the sofa, this time facing the wall.

"So?" Mike said, as they exited the office building. In his mouth was a freshly lit cigarette. The rain had let up a bit, and he dragged on it with pleasure. It felt good to be out of Boss's place. The mirrors didn't help either.

"I'm guessing this was Marley's idea," EZ said.

"You think?"

"I don't know, but he gave you the wrong address." EZ squinted at the street ahead, trying to spot a taxi.

"Could be a mistake."

"Never trust a pimp," EZ said, and began to dig in the pockets of his coat for an ID tag.

MARLEY

They found Marley in a completely unexpected place - a bar on the outskirts of the Metro. A complete coincidence. They got there by mistake. The taxi driver who took them there was a drone. He was just starting out and did not know the city, or how to use his own navigation system. After three circles around the outskirts of the Metro, Mike called for a stop. He got back his ID from the driver, swiped him quickly with his fist, and went out to look for another cab. The taxi took off spontaneously. It began to rain heavily then. There was not another hover in sight. To wait out the rain, Mike and EZ went inside the first building they saw with an 'open' sign on it.

Marley was too busy to notice them come in. A Doll, who had both of her hands in the lower reaches of his centipede suit, was attending to him. Most of his arms were dangling loosely over the counter, and all of Marley's eyes were closed. He clicked his tongue pleasurably from time to time. When the Doll left, he ordered a drink, but did not finish it. Maybe, he sensed some kind of trouble. He quickly looked around blinking his dozen red eyes in a random sequence, then swept up the drink and exited the bar. EZ was covering the exit as Mike followed him out. It was raining, and Marley ran really fast, even for a centipede. Mike and EZ had trouble keeping up with his pace. Marley turned the corner on 5th and Mason and disappeared into the dirty mouth of a tenement building. The security gate shut behind him with a bang, almost clipping his tail. He swore under his breath and ran upstairs as quickly as he could. EZ's approach to electronic locks and all other devices meant to keep things out was simple: he froze them. A blue wave of electricity bolted out of his right hand and lingered for a moment over the face of the door panel. In a few seconds, the gated doors moved open, revealing a simple, old-fashioned door made of fireproof wood.

They found Marley on the top floor of the tenement - he had just run up there and was pulling with all his might on his own door, but it wouldn't give way. He heard them coming up the stairs.

"Shit!" he hissed, pulling even harder on the door. Several times, he tried to break in, hitting it with his shoulder, careening, and waving his many arms in the air with each swing. He begged, he threatened, but the door remained shut.

"Honey! Baby! Let me in!"

A quarrelsome voice inside the room was swearing at him and telling him to stop. Finally, Marley plastered himself flat against the door, holding on to the doorframe with all his hands, but it still did not give way. Mike and EZ took a step closer, and in an instant, Marley ran up the wall and became still on the shadowy ceiling. He was very conspicuous up there given his size, but he'd done it without much thinking.

"Hello, Marley," Mike said, but Marley remained silently glued to the ceiling. "Come on down or I'll get you down." Mike tilted his Deko gun, pulling back the safety bar with a pronounced click. "One, two..."

Before he could finish, Marley detached himself all at once from the ceiling and tumbled to the greasy floor.

"Well, Marley?"

"Please! Don't kill me! It's not my fault!"

EZ pulled out a small slip of paper and a pencil. Marley stared at him in amazement.

"What's the address?" EZ asked.

"1508 West Pullman Avenue," Marley rattled off. "Please don't kill me!" he added.

"We aren't gonna kill you," Mike said.

"Really?" Marley said, incredulously.

"Really," Mike said, and gave him a heavy punch in the third segment of his abdomen. Marley doubled over, hissing.

Like all centipedes, Marley almost never fought back: instead, he curled up and played dead. It was a strategy. Sometimes, it worked. He began to curl up into a ball, but before he could accomplish it, Mike managed to land a few kicks to his more sensitive segments. As he remembered, a centipede's most tender areas were segments 4-9, but he didn't have time to count them: Marley had already curled up. He sobbed and hissed, but did not fight back.

"Hey, unscrew yourself, or I'll kick you down the stairs," Mike threatened, when combat became futile.

"No!" was the unequivocal response from Marley, whose voice was deeply muffled by his own oily segments.Mike tipped him a bit with his foot and he began to roll toward the edge of the stair landing.

"No!" he cried, and whipped out three arms that grabbed onto the railing. Mike gave him another kick, and Marley quickly descended the first flight of stairs.

When they were done with Marley, who was left with several missing appendages on the first floor, Mike and EZ left the grimy building and picked up another cab, which took them into the heart of the city. They were going to see Vincent. They needed the work.

IN THE HOUSE OF THE ROACH KING

Mr. Vincent, the Roach King, the proprietor of the Time Hotel, was not expecting any visitors. Slumped back in his chair, he was going over some papers from the previous year with the help of his assistant, Kaine. His assistant, although he was of a more or less regular stature, was dwarfed by Mr. Vincent's size. He kept at some distance from Mr. Vincent because of the roaches, which crawled all over the table and Mr. Vincent freely as he sorted through the paperwork. Occasionally, Mr. Vincent would remove a roach that had crawled onto his face with one of his tentacles, which descended like braids from the top his head, and replace it gently on his back or the surface of the table. On the wall directly behind Mr. Vincent's desk was a gigantic, old-fashioned mechanical clock. Each number on its dial was at least a foot in height. It ticked very loudly, but Mr. Vincent did not seem to mind it. He was surrounded by a miniature sea of various threateningly stamped, official looking papers, most of them citations for violations of the health code.

"I don't understand this at all, Kaine," Mr. Vincent said. A multitude of black, beady eyes twinkled angrily on his face. "My goal is authenticity, and I'm being fined for it!" A roach that had crawled onto the back of Mr. Vincent's hand hissed and flared his wings angrily as Kaine took back the papers. He quickly pulled his hand away.

"Well, sir, I'll have to speak with the commission," Kaine responded.

"This is not like it was in the old days," Mr. Vincent pondered. "Why do they keep pressing me for more control measures? It's a Time Hotel, goddamnit. It gives the place authenticity. Why, without the roaches, I'd lose half my clientele!" Mr. Vincent genuinely loved roaches, as well as that part of his clientele, which also loved roaches, and he could not understand why he was being fined. He rubbed his head reminiscently, dislodging a few rather large specimens from his temples. They jumped away, hissing quietly, and landed somewhere behind the desk, cracking and refolding their wings.

"Well, sir, I'll see into that," Kaine said.

"The new regulations won't come into effect until later this year, anyway. We have some time." He folded his hands and bowed to Mr. Vincent. "And now, if you'll excuse me, I will see who is at the door." Mr. Vincent nodded grimly. Kaine exited carefully, trying not to step on a roach.

When he got to the front door, the ringing of the bell and knocking had somewhat subsided. Kaine looked out of the spy hole and immediately decided not to open it.

"Damn drones!" he said quietly to himself.

"Hey!" he heard a voice outside say. "I heard that! We need to speak with Mr. Vincent."

This was followed by a series of almost indecently loud knocks on the door. Kaine shrugged. He stood in the lobby, deliberating. How did they get past the front gate? He wondered. The knocking was getting on his nerves.

"What do you want?" he finally said.

"We need to speak with Mr. Vincent."

"About what?"

"Leon."

Kaine pricked up his ears. "Who's Leon?" he asked, shouldering the door, but no response came after that. Kaine motioned for the security guards, and they came to stand on either side of the door, holding their weapons upright like the royal guard.After a lengthy interval, during which Kaine retreated upstairs and announced the visitors to Mr. Vincent, the door finally opened. The two guards, or rather, the muzzles of their cryoguns greeted Mike and EZ.

"That's a nice welcome!" Mike said."What do you want?" the guard asked him, with no intention of moving his cryogun barrel to a more conversation inducing aim.

"We have information about Leon. We need to speak with Mr. Vincent," Mike said, pointing the muzzle away from his face with his hand.

"Leave a message," the other guard responded.

"No can do. Let us speak to Mr. Vincent. It's a classy case," EZ put in.

The brainless ding-dong of the intercom sounded just above the door, and Kaine's voice calmly announced, "Admit them." The two guards stepped aside and let them go in. They followed Mike and EZ up the stairs, keeping their cryoguns at close range to their backs.

It was only when they had reached the second floor lobby that Mike put his hands down. He had unconsciously kept them up all the way upstairs. The massive, carved double door to Mr. Vincent's office opened silently and an effeminately peevish yet very deep voice quietly said, "Come in."The guards entered after Mike and EZ and stood by the door with their cryoguns pointed emptily at the ceiling. One of the guards had accidentally stepped on a roach, and was trying to conceal that fact by rubbing it off onto the decorative floor molding, but Mr. Vincent was too preoccupied with his new visitors to take note of this small, accidental murder.

"Mr. Vincent," EZ began. "We don't mean to disturb you, but..."

Mr. Vincent turned about slowly in his chair, eyeing Mike and EZ with all of his eyes simultaneously. Thin, transparent membranes rose and fell over each glassy black eye in succession as he blinked.

The air in the room was stagnant and smelled of old paper and something else that Mike couldn't identify. The atmosphere of the place was getting to him, and he moved his hand to cover a sneeze. Suddenly, all of the roaches who made their home on Mr. Vincent hissed and flew off, scattering into the corners of the room. Mr. Vincent frowned. He motioned to his assistant. Kaine stepped a bit closer to Mr. Vincent and gave him a little scribbled note, whispering something into his ear. Mr. Vincent read the note and frowned again; at the same time, one of his eyes turned bright reddish green. The assistant pulled back a little.

"Tell them," Mr. Vincent said heavily, "to go fuck themselves." He then handed the note back to Kaine, who took it, bowed quickly, and ran out of the room. The double doors were still swinging from his momentary exit when Mr. Vincent turned to Mike and EZ.

"What are you?" he asked.

"Drones," Mike said, flatly.

"Ah, I see. Artificial things, yes?" Mr. Vincent eyed them curiously: he had never seen a drone before in person.

Mike frowned. He hated scrutiny of this sort. "We have information about Leon Hessinger," he said. It was a lie, of course, but things could change. They just needed some time, as well as protection from their former boss.

"Is that so?" Mr. Vincent said slowly, the timbre of his voice rising and falling gradually into different frequencies. A horseshoe shaped device on the table was recording their conversation. It had a large, clamshell receiver shaped like the horn of an ancient gramophone. The gigantic clock on the wall behind him was ticking away obnoxiously. It seemed to be laughing at them. EZ stared at it as if hypnotized. For his part, EZ had never before seen a mechanical clock, at least not of this size. It wasn't a clock, he thought, it was a monument. He eyed it with genuine curiosity. He had no idea how it worked.

"Who are you?" asked Mr. Vincent.

"I'm Mike, and over there is EZ," Mike said, and EZ stopped staring at the clock and adopted a more official, presentable expression.

"A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Vincent," EZ said, bowing slightly.

Mr. Vincent smiled. For some reason, the sight of these two drones put him in a good mood.

"Leon Hessinger, yes?"

"Yes, sir. He's currently being transported to Kansas City, but it's only a holding block. His final destination is the prison in Willowcreek Bay. It's a twenty-five to life sentence, but we can get him out of there in no time." Mike almost blushed at the amount of things he was making up, or partially making up; based on misinformation he and EZ had received from some debatable sources, including old Marley. Mr. Vincent seemed pleased, however. He folded his hands and some of his tentacles under his chin and sat like this for a while, eyeing the drone brothers.

"He's an expert hacker from Nokida," EZ added. "If you have him on board, there's nobody you can't hack, even in the void."

Mr. Vincent nodded with pleasure. "Could he hack any database? Any database at all?"

"Of course, sir," replied EZ.

"Very well. You can stay in the Time Hotel at no charge, provided you find this Leon." Mr. Vincent got up. "Kaine!" he shouted into the gramophone horn on the table. "Get them room 205."

LEON

He was being transported by tram, but not through the Kamakira Valley.

Leon was an unremarkable young man. He had no distinguishing physical characteristics, aside from a natural, almost bony thinness and short height.

As he sat handcuffed in the tram that was transporting him and the other prisoners to Kansas City, he kept thinking of Rosie. Both of his hands were cuffed to the metal bar that separated him from York, his former colleague at Nokida, now also an inmate heading for Willowcreek Bay. York had been arrested at about the same time as Leon for the security breach, which released Rosie into the world. Although the suspicion fell heavily on Leon, they couldn't determine who was at fault. So, they arrested them both.

Leon kept thinking of Rosie. He wondered where she was now, and whether she'd managed to escape fully or got fried on her way out of the Nokida database. It was wrong to become so attached to an artificial intelligence, even more so, a virus, Leon knew that. He imagined the full scope of the damage she could do, not only to Nokida's database, but also to that of the Metro and the public networks, especially if something had already triggered off Dabel. The thought scared and excited him at the same time.

York was sleeping quietly next to him, bobbing up and down gently with the motion of the tram. He was still out, his head thrown back against the cheap, red, plastic seat. He had violently resisted arrest and was now sleeping off a large dose of tranquilizers. It was not his fault. Before he went out, York made a promise to kill Leon as soon as he got the chance. He said it very quietly and in a very sure voice, after which he shut his eyes mechanically and went to sleep.

Leon never dreamed that he would do this. If somebody had told him that he would purposely release an M-5 class virus into the public system, an act classified as terrorism and punishable by up to twenty-five years in jail, he would have been highly amused. Leon was a master hacker and the developer of several powerful viruses. He especially excelled at the latter, and had worked for Nokida for about five years before he made Rosie, which was an affectionate short for Remotely Operated Synthetic Ingram's Engine. The viruses were largely used to test the safety of Nokida's own new security systems (it was a security system manufacturer), as well as to combat problems in the existing networks. Leon had an absolutely clean record, did not drink, engage in any volatile behaviors except for void hacking, which was also a part of his job, and had, all in all, an almost perversely untarnished history with his employers as well as the law, but one day, things changed.It must be said that Leon was not a terrorist by nature. He had his faults, but he had never done anything before of quite that caliber. He did it almost on impulse. He did it for Nina, a girl whom he'd never even met.

THE NIGHT BEFORE EVERYTHING STARTED TO GO WRONG

The night before everything started to go wrong for Leon, he had a dream. In his dream, he saw a long, dark hallway. It smelled of old newspapers and, for some reason, iodine.

As he walked down this hallway, he saw many doors on each side of him, like those in an outdated asylum. He could hear alternating crying and laughter from inside these dark rooms. He knew that if they caught him, they'd put him into one of these rooms too. He wanted to get out of this place, but he couldn't. First, he had to find Nina.He opened one door randomly, and it swung inward freely, creaking on its hinges. There was no one inside the room. There were no windows or even furniture except a bed with an elaborate metal headboard. An IV stand stood in one corner of the room.

"Nina," he called out softly.

"I'm here," a girl's voice replied from the direction of the bed. "How do you know my name?"

"I don't know," Leon said quietly. "I know you need help."

"They're keeping me here," the invisible girl's voice said.

"Who are they?"

"I don't know. They're bad things."

They're using her somehow, he thought.

"Come with me," Leon said. He reached out his hand to the empty air and felt a warmth wrap around it. "Let's go," he whispered, and together they went out of the room.

Just ahead of them at the end of the hallway was a vending machine. It was empty.

"I'm hungry!" the invisible Nina said.

"Not now," Leon replied, but Nina had already let go of his hand. He felt her moving away from him. "Nina! Come back!"

The sound of someone tapping on the glass display of the vending machine was all he could hear. Leon approached the vending unit with his arms outstretched like a sleepwalker. He grabbed out at the empty air wherever he felt it was warm, but Nina avoided him. He could hear her footsteps fade as she ran away down the hallway.

"Nina, come back!" Leon began running after her, but a black, disorderly shape suddenly crossed the corridor. It raised its arms horizontally, blocking the hallway. Just behind Leon, another figure suddenly stirred into existence. It grabbed him from behind in a chokehold and began strangling him. Leon woke up.

He didn't know who Nina was, but in this dream, he felt that he'd known her for a very long time. There was something important about her that he couldn't remember just yet, but he had to save her from these things at any cost.

NINA

Nina was in the early stages of starving, and the air around her smelled pleasantly of leavening bread. She was chained with thin, silvery chains to the decorative spiraling railing that formed the top and sides of the bed's headboard. The chains were very thin but unbreakable. She had been here for some time, but she wasn't sure how long. Possibly a week, or three, or maybe even a month. She had lost track of time long ago, ever since they brought her into this room.

She did not know who these people were, as they always wore masks. They wouldn't let her go. She didn't know what they wanted. At first, she begged them to let her go, but they never spoke to her and she could never even see their eyes. They moved about her like silent shadows. They did nothing. They were just watching, as if waiting for something. Sometimes one or two, and sometimes a whole ring of shadows would stand by her bedside silently, not moving or saying a word.

There was nothing she could do. The room had no windows. Only a torchiere burned brightly in one corner under its muted green shade.

The room was old but clean. The ceiling crawled with various cracks and water stain patterns, which Nina got into the habit of scrutinizing for lack of anything else to do. The daily routine was another thing. An old woman helped her each day. She was also a shadow. She seemed to be kinder than the others, but she would never speak to her or meet her eyes.

After a while, Nina began to go insane. She would laugh, and talk, and sing to herself for hours. A shadowy figure would peer in through the doorway worriedly, but never come inside.

When she couldn't talk or sing anymore, Nina entered a new state: she became completely silent and stopped responding to anything at all. Her eyes were permanently fixed now on the cracked surface of the ceiling.

However, if Nina was not present here in this room, she was fully present in another place: it was a place of great beauty, where she was free.

She dreamed of a great city. It was a city she had never seen before, a city from the future. Nina would walk its streets, which were full of the strangest people she had ever seen. Some of them were not really people, even. There were things with extra arms, and eyes, and legs, insect-like things and bird-like things, but they all wore clothes and could talk intelligently. A Birdman called her over softly on one street corner and took her by the arm. He had bright red eyes, like those of an albino rat, and in his beak was an unlit cigarette. Nina was scared of him. "Please come with me," the Birdman said, and they began to walk away down the street, hand in hand.

As they passed under a tall arc, which read, "Metro - Entrance," the Birdman turned to Nina, and said: "Take the train to Stella Maris, Nina. He will be waiting for you. He will help you." Nina was about to ask who "he" was, but she was already walking down the concrete steps. Just ahead, the multiple horseshoe arcs lit up the subterranean entrance to the Metro. An old-fashioned train whistle sounded. The high-pitched scream of the whistle echoed through the dark halls of the subway, announcing the approaching train as it pulled into the station: a fantastic, antique looking thing. Nina only had enough time to read the destination placard on its side. It spelled, in glowing letters, "Port Stella Maris." Then she woke up.It was the same old room. Nothing had changed here. Nina looked up and saw the familiar pattern of the ceiling. One of her hands was lying freely now across the pillow. She followed the thin glistening tube with her eyes until they stopped at a small, translucent square bag suspended from a hat rack that stood in the corner. It functioned as a makeshift IV stand.

She was no longer dreaming. On the contrary, she felt more fully awake now than she had ever before in her life. The walls had gained solidity and color and suddenly came into focus, as it were. The ceiling began to pull away. It rose higher and higher, until it disappeared entirely from Nina's view into a shrinking rectangle of black, revealing a crystal blue sky with white clouds drifting across it.

Nina shook her head. She wanted to get up, to take out the useless IV, but she couldn't move. She kept looking at the sky. Several times, a Dutch Delta crossed it; a kind of passenger ship Nina had seen many times flying above the city. The aircraft cast its gigantic cold shadow into the room. When it finally passed, drifting very slowly, importantly, the room was once again full of sunlight.

"Hurry now, Nina," she heard someone say; it was the Birdman. He had descended into the room through the ceiling. He had small, iridescent wings, like those of a hummingbird; they beat at an amazing speed, fanning the air. The Birdman approached her and pulled out the IV. He smelled of nectar. He picked her up in his arms and they flew out through the open ceiling.

The Birdman carried Nina to a beautiful bright building shaped somewhat like a horseshoe. It was a very tall building, and its exterior was paneled with black sheets of glass that reflected everything around it. As they approached, Nina could see the blue sky and the white clouds drifting mirrored across its surface. This Round House, as Nina called it, also lacked a roof, and they descended right through and landed on its upper floor, which was also a ceiling.

SAM SOMAS

Only Sam Somas knew who Nina was. When he discovered it, or rather, understood it, it made him break out in a cold sweat. For several weeks, he couldn't shut his eyes.

Sam Somas, the founder and CEO of Somas AG, a close friend and longtime business partner of Renjou Bosco, one of the magnates of VorTex Tech and Nokida's boss, couldn't sleep. It had been weeks since he had last closed his eyes. He was afraid. He had never been so afraid in his entire life. Forty years ago, he had served in the First Great War. He had seen many things, but they were nothing compared to this.

Nina was first moved to the Somas headquarters in September of 4532. No one knew where she came from. Her body was discovered in a comatose state in the first floor lab of a shady clinic in Kansas City, the capital of the Kansas Palisade. The place was awful. On at least two separate occasions, Sam saw a very large rat scuffling lazily across the floor near an active neuropod case. Most of the deep sleep units were stockpiled on top of each other in order to save space. Several poorly sealed canisters, which contained neuropatients, stood freely on the floor in the basement lab. Nina's body was housed in a badly kept cryounit with only the minimum functions necessary for sustaining someone's life. It lacked even a basic body repositioning mechanism, which was a standard feature in all new units manufactured since 3230. Dating the neuropod itself revealed that its first, and, to date, longest activated cycle began sometime in 4285. According to the chief of staff, Nina had been in a coma for close to three hundred years.

"Bullshit," said Renjou, Sam's friend, when they were looking at the girl. She looked about fourteen, and had a beautiful face framed by jet- black, short cropped hair. She seemed to be simply asleep.

"Who's paying for this?" Renjou asked.

"Some folks up in the Maine, we don't know them personally. All private funding," replied the chief.

"We show her every year," the chief's assistant added.

"Putting on a freak show," Sam said.

He withdrew with Renjou and the chief into the chief's office and negotiated a price. The bulk of it went into transporting the fragile cryopod.

Three years later, Nina was still asleep.

They studied her extensively, and found that the chief was not lying for once: she had been asleep for two hundred and fifty years to the day.

SLEEPING BEAUTY

Nina had been in a coma since she was fifteen. She fell asleep one day and never woke up. No one knew what happened. After some record diving, Sam confirmed that she was the daughter of a researcher who worked for some psychiatric hospital division about two hundred years ago. She was placed under permanent observation, on an indefinite term. The company had agreed to this privately funded request. Nina's existence was kept a secret.

She had been sleeping for two hundred and fifty years, but her brain would not die, and she did not change. For this reason, she was studied extensively and finally moved to the headquarters of Nokida's sister company, Somas Applied Genetics. Nina's case was a bit of a legend and picked up the nickname of "Sleeping Beauty"and, indeed, she lay sleeping for eternity in the glass-like case of a partially inactive cryopod. Her brain had been scanned countless times. It was functioning normally. For all anyone knew, she could have been fully conscious all this time, although she showed no response to physical stimuli or the clumsy, still unperfected, and invasive "mind-reader" machine that tried to wake up her brain by poking through it with mild electrical signals - all unsuccessful, however.

The machines kept her alive. They called them, interchangeably, cryopods, neuropods, and ELSU's, which stood for Exiting Life Sustaining Units. Outside of the facilities, a cryopod was known, also interchangeably, as a dream machine, ice box, and wiener case. In reality, these "cryopods" were a combination of a cryounit and a life support system. If the patient died, the cryogenic system would be immediately activated. Over time, these machines became smaller, requiring less space and eventually became part of a single unit or hub located at the head of the pod. The hub had many elaborate silver-coated wires and tubing that ran down into Nina's head and arms, delivering the necessary fluids and monitoring her brain and organ activity.

One day, Sam was looking at Nina inside her cryopod. For a moment, it seemed to him that her hand had moved. Sam moved closer and began to study Nina with undivided attention. Her left hand was moving. It was moving in a pattern, like that of a void hacker. The lights in the room seemed to slightly dim. Sam's eyes opened a bit wider. He looked at the monitor that registered activity in the visual cortex. The green lines kept jumping and forming into letters, then breaking down again into mute valleys and peaks. He read the code, or, at least, thought he did. "I'm here," it said. "Help me."

The long scar on his cheek turned livid. He could have removed it long ago, but kept it as a personal reminder. This way, he still had a part in his own past, even those parts of it that were, in retrospect, somewhat hard to believe.

Nina's hand kept moving. Sam took off as quickly as he could.

When he returned with Dr. Rahm, the head of staff, and several assistants, the hand was still. They waited for the rest of the day, but there was no more movement. By evening, all of the brain monitors were completely silent.

MIDNIGHT

At midnight, Sam returned to the cryounit that contained Nina. He didn't know why. He sat down in the plastic "guest" chair by the side of her pod. Nina was still inside. She would be removed to the first floor lab in the morning for further study. The cooling system had turned on automatically when she died, and the cryochamber was now fully functional, lit up dimly by a blue indicator light. A cold mist was circulating inside it, glistening like snow inside a disturbed glass globe toy. He watched the falling "frost" forming on her eyelashes and thinly covering her face. It was beautiful, a pale blue, framed by her short, jet black hair. Her face seemed alive to Sam, as if at any moment, she would open her eyes and, perhaps, speak.

He wondered what her life had been like before, and how she came to be like this, two hundred fifty years in the future, a future that she had never seen. For about two hours, Sam sat in that chair and waited. He did not know why, or what he was waiting for. Finally, he got up. It was no use. Nina was dead.

He went upstairs to his office and fell asleep promptly on the sofa, without even taking off his shoes.

He had fallen into a deep sleep he hadn't experienced in years. He even began to see the forming beginnings of some dream.

At exactly three a.m., the alarm went off.

"Goddamnit," Sam cursed, jolted off the sofa. The alarm was still going. "What the hell," he said, sitting partially on the floor.

He hobbled over to the table and punched it off. The fall he'd taken off the couch had hurt his foot.

He went into the bathroom, and then stood for a while in front of the sink mirror. The mirror was reflecting someone, but it was not him. He quickly turned away and walked back into the room. He stopped.

Sitting on the couch right in front of him was a girl.

Sam reached for the nearest table edge and almost missed it. He couldn't breathe.

The girl looked at him, but did not speak. She shook her head, and her short black hair fell in disarray about her shoulders.

"Who are you?" Sam finally said. He was half-standing now, still gripping the table; his knees were giving way.

"I'm Nina," the girl replied, and shook her head again, as if the question was unnecessary.

"Yes. Yes, you are," Sam said from across the table. "What are you doing here, Nina?"Nina looked down at the floor and seemed to think for a while.

"I don't know," she finally said.

"I... I'm sorry."

"Why?"

"I couldn't help you. I'm sorry, Nina."

Sam woke up. It was still dark, but pale shafts of light were gradually seeping into the room from the partially curtained window. He lay still for a while. He blinked his eyes, and it ran down his cheek and dove into the collar of his shirt.

MORNING

In the early hours of the morning, Sam was still in his room. He didn't want to go downstairs, much less meet anyone yet. He waited. He knew that by noon, Nina would have been removed to the basement lab.

At three p.m., when Sam was having lunch with Dr. Rahm and several members of his team in the cafeteria, a very terrified looking assistant ran into the room and stopped at Sam's table. His mouth was open, but he couldn't speak. He just stood there, gesturing weakly in the direction of the doorway.

"What? What is it?" Sam asked him irritably.

Dr. Rahm's phone suddenly rang. He picked it up.

"Yes? Uh...Sam?" Rahm stared at Sam with an expression similar to that of the assistant.

"What is it?"

"It's for you," Rahm said in a strange voice, and handed him the phone.

They were gathered around Nina again, this time in the basement lab. The ceiling lamps shone brightly, casting strange, unnaturally sharp shadows on everyone's faces. Taken off life support and frozen to 130 degrees Celsius, Nina's brain was somehow reactivated, which showed up on the monitors in starkly colorful, rising thin peaks more characteristic of a brain in lucid state dreaming rather than early cryosleep.

No one understood what happened. It went against all rules and possible explanations. There was just no way, but she was alive. They had to reactivate the life support system manually, as it was not designed to function after a patient went into cryosleep. Fortunately, Nina's true state was discovered just before the final stage filler system activated; if that had happened, they would have never been able to bring her back - at least, not at this time. Nina was carefully moved upstairs to the central hub, which housed many other patients of the facility who were in either deep coma or cryosleep. Over the next few weeks, she began to show signs of sporadic improvement: she was still in a deep sleep state, but her brain readings were picking up increasing activity in the visual cortex.

THE CITY ATTACKS ITSELF

Early on the morning of October 15th, 4535, the Metro experienced an event unprecedented in all its history: the Metro's central control system sent a small patrol plane crashing into one of the domed roofs of the Metrodome. No one was killed except the two pilots, who were drones. Their remains were never recovered. The event was subsequently ruled to have resulted from a system malfunction. The entire public network was overhauled as different teams of experts searched for the culprit that caused the error, but it was never found. The system functioned perfectly. There was no trace of any error. Even more surprisingly, the accident was not recorded by any of the security systems around the Metro, although thousands of bystanders as well as the city's police witnessed it.

The next day following the accident at the Metrodome, Sam was in his office when all the lights suddenly went out. Sam looked at the main monitor: it was dead. It was an impossible situation, for two reasons: firstly, the main generator powered all the lights and equipment within Somas AG locally. Even if this generator failed, there were twenty more in the basement of the building standing on the ready. They would automatically switch on in case of a power failure or any other kind of malfunction. Secondly, even if the main power line was cut, an extremely difficult thing to do as it was five meters thick and located in the most remote and secure area of the building, just below its central hub - even in that event, or if it was somehow interrupted by an electrical jolt of enormous voltage, there were back up, portable power sources located all over the building. Thus, it was simply impossible for all the power to go out at once. When one system failed (which had never happened, incidentally) another system would feed the necessary amount of power to the most vital areas of the research facility - the life supports in the ICU and the central hub.Sam got up from his desk. His hands were shaking. The floating street lamps outside his window seemed to give off less light than usual. Down below in the street, everything seemed normal. Sam reached for his phone. It was dead.Almost blindly, he made his way to the door. On his first step downstairs, he ran into Michael, his assistant. He had no lights with him.

"Mr. Somas - we've been attacked!" he said breathlessly.

"Is there any power in the building?" Sam looked at his watch, but the display was dim.

"No. It's been drained out completely. Even the portables are not working."

Michael was right: there was no power inside the building at all. When they got downstairs, the lobby was crowded with the confused staff. Sam stopped for a moment in the doorway, his hands on its frame, like a diver hesitating before a sea of dark moving figures. At the far end of the room, dim, bluish light flooded in from the glass entrance doors. Two security guards were at the emergency exit: one of them was using a screwdriver to pry open the lock panel, but it was no use.

"Everyone, stay where you are," Sam said from the doorway. "I'm going to get help."Sam and Michael moved slowly through the wavering crowd of anonymous dark shapes until they reached the front door.

"Everybody, stand back," Sam said. He took out a zapper gun. He clicked on its fire button, but it did not work: all the power in its battery had been completely drained.

"We'll lose our entire hub," Rahm's voice said unevenly in the darkness next to him.

"I know," Sam replied. He picked up the first thing he could find; an antique microscope. It had served as a purely decorative item inside the lobby, but it was heavy enough. Sam swung it at the door a few times, but the glass did not break. Moments later, he heard something heavy being dragged toward him across the lobby: it was Michael and the two security guards pulling up a desk. They used it as a battering ram against the stubborn reinforced glass. After about ten attempts, the door began to budge a little. Thin, rectangular cracks appeared in its surface, forming the pattern of a grid. Another hit and it bulged, rebounded slightly into the room, and burst into a mosaic shower of broken glass.

"Get everyone out, now," Sam said quietly to the two security officers, and ran out through the broken door followed by Michael and Dr. Rahm.

Sam, Dr. Rahm, Michael, the entire security force of Somas, and most of its top staff were gathered in the white, glistening meeting room on the first floor. It had been mopped clean for the occasion after the outage: the rest of the rooms, especially on the floors below, were a mess.

"How did this happen?" Sam asked the obvious question.

There was a brief silence, during which Sam could hear someone crying.

"We don't know, Mr. Somas," Rahm said. He was holding several sheets of paper in one hand.

"According to the damage report, it was a local power failure. No other parts of the block have been affected. For some reason, nobody was even aware of our situation for two hours, and there is no record of us having a power drain, at least, based on these recordings."

"What about the hub?" Sam asked, eyeing his staff. There were a few people missing.

"Final assessment," Rahm replied, "forty-five dead in the central hub, except those sixteen in the immediate vicinity of Nina's cryopod."

"What about Nina?"

"She's doing well," Rahm said, and folded the papers.

THE BIRDMAN

The Birdman was very upset with Nina. He wouldn't speak to her anymore. He had his hands in the pockets of his coat, and stood facing the window of Nina's new room.

"Sam," Nina called him.

He shrugged his shoulders, without actually turning to look at her, and the daylight bounced radiantly off his translucent wings and sent rainbows flying across the bright white ceiling.

She wanted to tell him that she was sorry, that she didn't mean to cause so much trouble, but she couldn't. She was especially sorry about the Birdman's tree house. That's where he lived. He told her so himself.

That night, Sam saw Nina again. He had long since stopped sleeping inside his office in the Somas building and had his driver take him home every evening, even though it was quite a long way and Sam felt more comfortable being present in the facility at all times of the day as well as night.This time, Nina was standing by the side of his office table. She was crying.

Sam woke up and looked at the clock: it was about four in the morning and the light in his room was still dim.

"Oh jeez," he said. "This girl will drive me insane."

RENJOU

Renjou was lying in Sam's office in a long, deeply reclined chair. It was in truth more of a bed than a chair, and, when fully reclined, made sitting in it hardly possible. It was made of some kind of dark maroon synthetic leather that was constantly sticking to his hands. It was remarkable how quickly the brief vacation was wearing away from Renjou. His skin once again adopted a lilac undertone, and he was perspiring heavily and constantly wiping away the sweat on his forehead with a kitchen towel he got from Sam. The towel had a pattern of yellow ducks on it. Renjou soaked one end of it in the glass of water and placed it over his head.

"They've been at me all morning," Renjou said, leaning back in the leathery arms of the bed.

"Did he tell you why?" Sam asked.

"No, but he made it very clear to me that we had to move it. He said it was a 'private request' from the SRI." Renjou curled his fingers mockingly. Only the lower half of his face was visible now beneath the duck-covered towel. His mouth was square and mean in its shape, and always seemed to have a subtle snarl about it. He grimaced. "Where the hell do they get their orders?"

Sam was a trifle offended. This information was new to him.

"I don't know where it came from, Sam," Renjou said. "I'm just going to drop them all for now and go for another trip."

Sam was standing by the window. He'd pulled open one curtain and was watching the street below. It was a bright, sunny day, but a cave-like darkness reigned inside the office. Sam frowned, in part because Renjou was lying, and, in part, because he felt there was something bigger and nastier to this whole thing than even Renjou knew.

"Since when did they start making private requests?" Sam said, without turning to face him.

"And the other day, I got a call from the chief, Saleri."

"What? Why?"

Renjou folded his hands under his head. The towel was slowly falling. "I don't know," he said. "It could be some Eclectus business. You know how that shit always starts. First the drone attacks, then the raid on the temple."

Sam looked at Renjou, but the protective towel was still covering his face.

"What could they need it for, I wonder?" Sam pondered.

Renjou did not know the answer to that. He partially sat up in the maroon recliner, stroking the stubble on his chin and jaw with the flat of his hand.Sam looked at him, and, perhaps for the first time during that whole hour he saw Renjou's eyes. It was an unlikely thing, but they had lost some of their original focused hardness, and he looked doubtingly at Sam.

"Sam, do I have your permission to move Nina's cryopod?"

Sam turned away from the window. Earlier that day, he had received news that the Metro had fired its first outward directed missile. It landed in the Maine and, no matter the explanations offered and attempts to make amends, the event sparked much anger and desire for retaliation, especially among the Eclecti, a semi-religious branch of the SRI whose different groups had been battling each other, both verbally and with the help of the military, for several decades.

There were some reasonable people among them, but the vast majority of the Eclectus Doomsday Cult was apocalyptically obsessed with a certain volume known as the Death Directory or "Death Book." The origins of this Directory were never explained and could not be traced. It seemed to have appeared spontaneously on the Metro's network, sometime after the end of the First Great War. It contained the exact birth and death dates of almost every single person in the Metro. At first, no one took it seriously: it was just a hoax, one of the many pranks the Metro had seen over the years, but over time, the dates in this Directory were all confirmed by actual births and deaths.

The birth and "end" dates were all correct to the hour and minute. Some of the people who took the step and found themselves in the Directory's listing took their own lives before their end dates approached. Amazingly, the Directory was immediately updated. That is when it gained the notorious attention of Renjou Bosco.

In particular, one section of the Directory contained millions of end dates that fell on the same day and year. The most religiously affiliated branch of the Eclecti insisted that it prophesied the end of the world, or, at least, the Metro, and a cult was promptly formed around it. Although the cultists retrieved much of the book to their Temple, the end date was never confirmed. After several attempts to destroy the temple, followed by religiously themed retaliation, the Directory was pulled down and destroyed in its entirety under Nokida's watchful eyes. As a result of this Eclecti business, Renjou remained permanently suspicious of the SRI, including their chief, Saleri, and their latest request for Nina, that sounded more, in truth, like an order, did not sit well with him at all. He did not press Sam about it. There was still time, but his relationship with Saleri was becoming more troubled.

For his part, Sam was also distrustful. He had seen it all before. These were the stirring beginnings of a large-scale civil war.

Sam looked down at the street below the window, and remembered the start of the first Great War. It started in a very similar way, almost too similar. It destroyed the Metro and its three nearest neighboring Palisades in a single instant. The city was swept away, with the exception of the Metrodome, which had somehow survived the attack. Mentally, he saw the streets and buildings below turning into smoking jagged Lego blocks. He pulled down the curtain.

"I don't like this whole business," he said. "If they get fired up about it, we'll have a problem on our hands."

Sam was right.

Early on the morning of December 7th, the Maine fired its first rockets at its closest neighboring Palisade.

THE ROUND HOUSE

The night after the attack on the Metrodome, Leon saw Nina again. In his latest dream, she was no longer in that horrible, asylum-like building full of shadows. He still couldn't see her, but her voice now came from a brightly lit room. It was a hexagonally shaped room, with many closets rising in multiple tiers all around. Each of these "closets" sat on a step right above another. Leon knew they weren't really closets, but they sort of reminded him of them. They were like small, separate houses, each with a door or two doors, depending on their size. The tiered steps rose so high that the topmost doors vanished somewhere below the ceiling in a white, shimmering cold haze. It was a bit colder here in this room shaped like a giant honeycomb, but overall it wasn't a bad place. A big tree grew right in the center of this room - Leon could only see its trunk, which emerged from the floor and disappeared into the ceiling. Although he still could not see Nina, there were lantern-like objects floating about. They were small, spherical, glowing things that reminded Leon most of the Metro's street lamps.

"Where are you?" Leon asked the invisible girl.

"I'm right here," Nina's voice said next to him, and Leon jumped a little.

"No, I mean, where are you? What is this place?"

"I'm in the Round House," Nina's voice answered.

"The Round House?"

"Uh huh. The Birdman brought me here. His name is Sam."

Leon became alarmed. "And...what does this Birdman look like, Nina?"

"I don't know. He has these tiny little wings. He's very sweet."

"Can you take me to the Birdman?"

"No. The Birdman doesn't like me anymore," Nina muttered. Although Leon couldn't see her face, he knew that she was upset.

"Why not?" he asked her.

Nina seemed to stall for a moment. "I don't know."

"How long have you been here?""I don't remember. I want to leave now," Nina said, and the air around Leon grew colder.

"Wait," he said. He sat down on one of the white steps, thinking. Behind him was the tightly shut, mechanical mouth of a closet. He could feel its frozen breath at his back. He did not like the sound of the Birdman.

"Listen, Nina," Leon spoke up at length. "I need to ask you something. It's important. Promise to tell me the truth."

"I promise," Nina replied. "What is it?"Leon thought it over some more, and then said, "Is there anyone keeping you here?"

Nina thought about it for a while. "No," she finally answered.

"Are you sure?"

"No," Nina said, after some hesitation. "But I don't know who he is."

THE LETTER

"I'm in the Round House..."

What could she mean? He imagined what a round house might look like. He thought about Nokida's headquarters. It was a tall, cylindrical building with an interior courtyard at its hollow center. Was she being kept somewhere inside Nokida HQ? And, presuming that was the case, what for?

Hands folded behind his back, Leon thought, pacing about his room. It suddenly occurred to him that this could be some sort of test by the company. For a second or two, he panicked. He recalled everything he'd said and done around Nina, the invisible girl, or, what he thought was a girl. Careful now, Leon thought to himself. He felt blood rushing past his ears like a waterfall. He switched on the telly just to drown it out. It came on with a loud burst of noise, and Leon sprang up to it and moved his fingers down the screen - he had been listening in headphones earlier. The channel was set to local news:

"A massive power outage at Somas Applied Genetics has caused countless damages to the company's equipment as well as likely loss of life. A spokeswoman for the company said that the reason for this outage is unknown and is currently under investigation. Somas AG is a state of the art cryonic research facility and the sister company of Nokida and VorTex Tech. It offers full cryosuspension services, as well as support of patients who are in a deep sleep state. Potentially, such a massive power outage can cause the cessation of all life support systems. Calls from relatives of those sustained in the facility have gone unanswered by Somas AG. A spokesman for Mr. Sam Somas, the CEO of the company, has refused to comment, beyond saying that it was an unfortunate incident. More updates as the story develops."

Leon stared blankly at the screen. It was showing an aerial view of the Somas building. It was shaped like a giant cylinder with an open center, inside of which was a courtyard-like structure sheltered under a clear glass canopy."The Round House," Leon said to no one in particular. He looked closer and paused the broadcast: under the glass canopy, he could make out the shape of a very big living tree.

"If she's there," he thought, pacing about the room again, "they must be using her somehow. She may be one of those people in cryosleep or coma. If she's alive, that is..." Leon stopped. He remembered the Shadows, and shuddered. One of them was trying to strangle him in that dream. It was a dream, but it felt very real. For the first time in his life, Leon felt unsure about the realness of the reality around him. He shook his head. "It's either some kind of goddamn test, or it's just my imagination," he said aloud, but his voice did not sound very convincing, even to him.

"Careful now," Leon said to himself.

Afterwards, Leon did not see Nina again for three weeks. He was somewhat relieved, but it worried him at the same time.

What if they caught her? He thought. What would they do? What would the Shadows do? I should have asked her more questions, but how could I know?

Leon tried searching the Somas database, but she was not there. There was no public or even semi-accessible record of her existence. He was exhausted that day (he had argued with York, his colleague at Nokida, the previous day and they were no longer speaking, at least for the time being). Leon fell asleep quickly after the drink.

This was the first time Leon actually saw Nina, but he could no longer hear her voice. They communicated now entirely through gestures, and sometimes without any gestures at all, only through their thoughts. After a while, they could hear each other effortlessly. When he asked Nina about how she came to be asleep, she told him about the bad dream she had when she was fourteen. In the dream, the Shadows came and took her away. She did not remember anything else.

He heard Nina's voice inside his head:They're watching me. Can you chase away the Shadows?I'll try; he heard his own voice say.Leon taught Nina how to use the basic alphabet. She learned it very quickly. The first word she spelled out using the code was "Roseg8," but when Leon asked her what it was, she wouldn't say. He taught her some tricks, but he was still being careful. This way, Leon thought, we might be able to talk during the day, if she's real.

I am real! Nina's voice said inside his head. She was almost crying.

I know. I'm sorry. Talk to me.

In the morning, Leon had a splitting headache. He'd never experienced pain of this intensity before. If somebody had asked him to rate it, on a scale of 1 to 10, he'd place it somewhere at an 8.9. The problem was he'd never gotten drunk before in his life. It was an exceptional headache. He threw up, and then ran cold water over his head, but it did not help: the monstrous headache did not go away. It was only getting stronger. Leon collapsed to the floor before he reached the bed, and appeared at his destination after a good ten minutes on all fours. It was terrible, but it was clearing a bit now. He had to call in sick to work. As soon as he was able to walk in a more or less bipedal manner, Leon reached for the phone. There, on the small folding table among the disheveled boxed remains of a supper from the previous night, and in spite of his blurred vision, he noticed a little yellow envelope addressed to him, and labeled,

"Confidential". He opened it half way to see whom it was from. It was in a strange language he'd never seen before; written entirely in some sort of code. The text included crazy smiley faces and other emoticons to boot, which seemed to serve as a decorative border around its edges. "Oh God," he said, as the headache was returning. He turned the envelope in his hands, dog-earing one corner.Leon made it safely back to the couch and lay down. He began to read the text, which crawled bawdily in all directions, then noticed the strange postal logo and flipped the page the other way up. It still made as little sense as when it was upside down.

A joke? A threat? A random prank or a mistake? Or only a glitch within the messaging system, which vomited up this monstrous piece of gibberish? He was so preoccupied with the text that it did not occur to him to ask the next natural question - how it ended up on the table in his room.Leon knew most of the coding languages, and even in his current state he quickly assessed the strange letter to be a cross between at least five of them, with a mixture of human sleet and, childishly enough, Pig Latin.

When he finally decoded it, the message was very simple. It said: "Help me chase away the Shadows Roseg8."

Leon sat up bolt upright on the couch.

THE TROJAN HORSE

Leon called in sick and stayed indoors all day. He'd even pulled all the blinds shut. He was afraid. He was thinking of the time before he received strange, anonymous letters, saw dreams that seemed to be coming true, and had, in general, a more or less solid view of himself and the surrounding world. Later that day, he hooked himself up to the machine: he was going to find out who Nina was no matter what. He spent the day in a wiry, biting cap of electrodes. They occasionally stung his scalp like small troublesome insects, but they would take him into the void. It was a strictly illegal thing to do.

At long last, Leon found it. He was not surprised to see that it belonged to Somas, but he could not find a safe way to break in.

As he approached Rosegate, he felt that there was someone on its other side. He didn't know for sure, but there was something there: it was like seeing a shadowy shape through a rain covered window. It could have been anyone, or anything, for that matter. The shape was calling out to him, but the security barrier around it was too strong. Leon was not going to attempt to cross it as he was barehanded, or he would get fried, quite literally: the most powerful security systems had been known to burn their trespassers to a crisp, even as they sat in their hackers' chairs hundreds of thousands of miles away from their target. It was a grisly, and worst of all, deeply humiliating death for a professional hacker. He would need another program to open it.

Rosegate was just a security system. He had to find out who, or what, was trying to get his attention on the other side. He was only going to take a look. It wouldn't take much time, and, if he used Rosie, it would even look completely legitimate. Hacking was just a part of his job.

Every time Leon connected to the machine, he wondered if it was somehow wiretapped to read him as well. Could it be? He thought, but it did not seem likely. To date, no one could see someone's dreams or read someone's thoughts - at least, not that literally, and directly.

He could think of three possibilities: a "loyalty test" came to his mind first. That was all very well, but how could they know his dreams? He'd never mentioned anything to anybody, and if this thing, or girl, was real, why would they be keeping her? The "closets" in his latest dreams reminded him of cryopods, but people in cryosleep or coma don't have access to physical messaging systems. The letter might as well have been hand written, as it contained a unique identifier. If this was some sort of coincidence, it was an almost impossibly coincidental one.

The third, and last, possibility scared Leon most of all. It was approaching the paranormal and mystical, which Leon usually tended to avoid like the plague, because this murky field was always full of quackery, misinterpretation, and just plain stupidity. For a few minutes, Leon gave in to this train of thought, but quickly brushed it off. There were no such things as ghosts, much less ones that used the latest hacking techniques to send mysterious postal messages.

For a while, he watched Rosie's progress on the Somas network. She worked sweetly and quietly, without triggering anything off. Leon waited for some sort of sign from the other side of the gate, but all was silent. Gradually, he began to drift off.

Hours later, Leon jumped back a little from his screen. In front of him were spinning, colorful DNA-like strands. If they could speak, this is what they would have said: "Hello, Leon. Do you remember me? I'm Dabel. Thank you for bringing me back."

Leon threw off the electrode cap. He grabbed the screen, then tossed it into the virtual trashcan and looked around wildly. His hair was standing on end.The little segment, the little bit that made up Rosie's core and made it a bit of a Trojan Horse, had, by itself, rebuilt itself into an almost full scale program. Not just a program - it was a virus. Leon stood up from his desk. The multicolored patterns were jumping shakily in front of his eyes."Impossible," Leon said quietly to himself, and paused the spinning DNA-like rungs. They stopped dancing mid-step and floated calmly across the unsuspecting face of the local network.

He had used only a small section of the code, but somehow Dabel had rebuilt himself from a single segment. This was a problem Leon had not anticipated when he planted Rosie's core. He hit release, and the color-coded rings resumed jumping about gaudily. Short of shutting down all the networks at once, there was no way to stop it.

He sat down again in the chair and stared at the flickering screen.

If anyone found out, he would be dead even before the whole thing began.

DABEL

Dabel caused a worldwide system meltdown in 4283. It triggered a massive power outage that effectively shut down almost all power in the seven major Palisades, as if they had been vacuumed clean of any energy. Among many other dire consequences, it resulted in several nuclear power plant failures, traces of which still lingered in places like the Reaches.

Dabel was finally brought under control only two years later. Bits and pieces of the blasted virus still lingered and cropped up from time to time in various places, but it was eventually eliminated. The code for Dabel was uprooted and finally destroyed. Anyone possessing even a segment of it was subject to capital punishment.

Leon had a copy.

Dabel had fascinated him ever since he was a boy. At the age of seven, he began collecting. He collected all the information he could find about this super virus, and eventually pieced some things together. About twenty years later, he built it, or at least, a replica of it. It was beautiful and deadly at the same time.

He'd never dreamed of actually setting it loose, however. That was never his intention: it was just a toy. It was like someone who'd secretly constructed a massive, yet elegantly sized, bomb in their basement and took a peek at it from time to time with great pleasure and pride in the craftsmanship. Would it work? Of course. It was meant to, but there was no reason to set it off: it was a static work of art.

That's how Leon thought of his version of Dabel. Of course, Dabel was invisible, as it was a program, but Leon could see it. He could see its architecture, its beauty, as well as its flaws, which he was intending to fix in his spare time.

He had never intended for it to get out, and had not used even a tenth of Dabel's full capacity in Rosie's core, yet, Dabel was alive and well on the network.

ROOM 205

When Mike and EZ first stepped into room 205 of Mr. Vincent's Time Hotel, they were struck by the antiquated appearance of everything in the room: the place was true to its description. It had authentic steel faucets, which turned on water when you rotated the handles clockwise and, sometimes, counter-clockwise, comfortably archaic furnishings and even wallpaper, which was torn in some places and showed realistic patches of light colored stucco.

This particular room was set in the early '90s of a long past millennium. There was even an antique TV stationed on a low sitting table inside the living room. It took EZ a while to figure out how it worked. When he turned it on, he was mildly shocked by a zap of static from its screen. He watched the TV for a few hours with great interest - it was running old programs from the time.

Eventually, he realized that it was giving him a headache and turned it off. He sat staring at the blank screen for a while, then got up, and got himself some water. When he returned, he sat down again on the couch. From beneath the TV, his sensitive ears could detect the small stirrings of insects. On a whim, he reached out his hand and sent a mild jolt of electricity from his index finger under its square bottom panel, which was followed by a lot of hissing and cracking of invisible wings.

A roach emerged from beneath the TV set. He looked offended. He stood up on the table and looked EZ straight in the eye.

"You!" EZ heard the roach say. "You have no right!"

"Who are you?" EZ asked the roach.

"That is none of your business," he replied, angrily flapping his wings. "And if you don't wake up right now, I'm gonna have to short-circuit you," the roach threatened, for some reason, though, in Mike's voice.

"Come on, EZ, get off your ass. It's time to get to work."

EZ shook his head. "Oh," he said. "I have a terrible headache now. Can it wait?"

"No. Come on."

They went out through the gilded (albeit, heavily cracked) vestibule of the Time Hotel. It was time to find Leon.

It was the only window of time before Leon would be moved to the maximum security prison in Willowcreek Bay. From then on, things would get a bit problematic.

THE DESERT

When they arrived at the appointed site, the train had already stopped.

"Wait," EZ said. "I see a trooper coming."Mike zoomed in his new eye on the approaching vehicle. It was an armored car. The train was standing still in the middle of the desert, its long, dark shape lying stretched and caterpillar-like, far ahead on the tracks. Its small head was lost in the dazzling sunshine in the distance. The local mirages had their way with everything here, playing, distorting, stretching, and bending all things, moving them further and closer as they pleased in this burning funhouse mirror.

Mike and EZ waited. The heat was getting to them. The armored car spat out two fully uniformed members of the SRI, border patrol agents who carried the most lethal weapon of all, Deko guns, as well as an assortment of various other toys.

"Fuck!" Mike suddenly said, succinctly describing the situation.

EZ looked, but couldn't see what he was seeing. "What? What is it?" he asked.

"It's the border patrol." Mike leaned forward a bit, zooming in.

"What are they doing?" inquired EZ.

"They-they-they're taking him!" Mike said, as his mouth hung ajar. The black shiny discs of his ventilator fans were spinning inside it with amazing speed.

"Are you sure it's him?"

Mike zoomed in a bit further on the ant-like figures in the wavering landscape of the desert. His telescopic eye panels strained and clicked. "Yeah, that's him."

"What the hell?" EZ said, scratching his neck. It was covered with a tar like residue - his jacket was melting to his back.

The armored car sped away. Mike and EZ looked at each other, but couldn't find anything useful to say.

Later in the day, they returned to Mr. Vincent, empty handed, as it were, and reported the situation. Mr. Vincent was not amused, but he understood the nature of the business and cut them some slack in the form of a small upfront payment.

DREAM

"Why? Why are you freezing her?" Rahm asked.

"Because we have to. Don't ask me any questions, Rahm," Sam replied. "We just have to do it."

"But...but she was just waking up! I don't understand..."

"Did you hear what I said? Freeze her."

Dr. Rahm stood dumbfounded in the doorway.

"It's an order."

Sam looked at what remained of the hub: a few damaged cryopods whose monitors were jumping now like crazy. "Hurry!" he barked, and Rahm shakily opened the panel of Nina's cryounit. Rahm looked warily at Sam over his shoulder one more time, his eyes asking, "Are you sure?" Another jolt shook the entire building. A fire alarm went off nearby.

"Yes," Sam said. "Hurry now."Rahm nodded, and slowly brought the unit down to a freezing temperature. Almost all activity in the wiry crown around Nina's head ceased then, and the cluster of monitors stopped displaying any readings.That afternoon, Sam removed Nina's cryopod to the most secure area of Somas AG, located in the basement in the same room that housed the gigantic power cables. After that, he effectively stopped, prohibited, any further tests or attempts to "wake her up" under penalty of dismissal from the company, pursuant as a criminal act.He knew that if Nina woke up, the world would end.

That night, Sam had a terrible dream. He saw Nina, but he knew it wasn't really Nina anymore: she was covered, or partially consisted of, dirty tar-like strings. The strings wiggled and moved in her skin like black greasy worms. Half of her face was eaten away in this manner. She was disintegrating, rotting, right before his eyes.

"Nina," Sam called her, hoping to at least hear her voice.

"Nina is gone," the monstrous thing said in Nina's voice.

Sam stepped back.

"Who are you?"

"Dabel," the monster replied in a horrible, distorted growl that echoed through Sam's head. It caused him intense pain to hear the metallic, deafening ringing of these echoes, and he put his hands to his head and shut his eyes.

The Shadows appeared and stood around Sam in a circle, whispering among themselves in many voices. Their echoes drilled through his skull.

"What do you want?" he asked Dabel.

"To awake," Dabel replied, and Sam could not hear or see anything anymore.

It was 3 a.m.

He wanted to talk to someone. He knew only one person he could trust: Renjou. Unfortunately, Renjou was away, and he didn't want to discuss it with him over any messaging system.

He had to wait. He shuffled over to the kitchen cabinet and got out some pills. He had to stay awake. He knew that if he fell asleep again, he might never wake up. Renjou would be back before long, but he couldn't risk it. He took out a piece of notepaper and a pencil. He wrote a brief but clear-headed letter, and then put it into an envelope addressed to Renjou, with instructions to open it only upon his death. He put it into the cabinet of his office table. This relieved him somewhat, and he sat back in his chair, thinking.

GHOST

"Sam, that's not possible," was Renjou's first sentence.

"I know what it sounds like, what it looks like, but you have to see this thing first," Sam said, and led Renjou into the basement lab.

They stopped at Nina's pod.

"It's just a girl, Sam. You just had a bad dream."

"No!" Sam stared for a moment at the pale, unresponsive face beneath the glass. "It's not just a dream. I even...never mind." He came close to Renjou and whispered in his ear. "She's controlling Dabel. It's like...a ghost."

Renjou smiled stupidly for a moment. Then his mouth withdrew to its regular menacing position on his face. He was concerned for Sam, who looked very ill from the general stress and the lack of sleep. He'd been awake for nearly two weeks now. He looked like a ghost himself; but Renjou still could not believe it. It was impossible. There were no ghosts, or at least, no Dabel. Dabel was dead.

Renjou himself made sure of that twenty years ago, when he came across the last strain of the virus.

Nevertheless, Sam needed his help."You need to get some sleep, Sam," he said, and they began the long walk upstairs.

The building had long been evacuated. Only a few members of the team, Sam, and the security personnel were present to assess the damage. The rest of the staff not injured in the shelling was taken to the Orlando, the northernmost of the Seven Palisades. The Orlando was quickly becoming overcrowded as more and more people fled the Metro and the surrounding Palisades. Most of the city's remaining population was currently living inside the Metrodome, which could comfortably house about two million people inside its two largest domes. Each "dome" was a gigantic city, arranged in multiple circular tiers. A massive escalator system radiated from the city center, its multiple branches reaching to the very top. In structure, it resembled an enormous shopping mall.

The Metrodome had been built as a safe house for times of conflict and was well protected from all types of damage. It had saved millions of people during the First Great War from the radon shelling and the final, massive attack that swept away the rest of the city in a matter of seconds.

"Renjou, you're the only one I can talk to, you know that," Sam said, when they were up in his office. "I'm telling you, I saw her hand moving during those attacks - she was calling them!"

"You're serious?"

"Yes! Goddamnit, I'm very serious. I don't know how, but she is doing it. Or, perhaps, she is some kind of conduit."

"Conduit, eh?" Renjou thought for a minute.

He scratched his chin, which was covered by three days' worth of stubble. He had just returned from another vacation, this one a bit shorter than the last, because of the pressing Saleri-Eclectus business. His face was still fresh, but sitting here in Sam's office was letting in a sort of dull, desperate grayness, which seemed to be seeping into his pores the longer he sat there. He got up and took a somewhat circular walk about the room.

"So who could be using her as a conduit?" he said, his hands folded academically behind his back. He resembled a teacher who'd just asked his student for an answer to a difficult problem.

"I don't know," Sam replied. He was shaking with cold, and rubbed his hands together, then placed them into the pockets of his jacket. "Maybe, it was whoever..." Sam was interrupted.It sounded like the scream of a giant Valkyrie flying through the sky. The walls of the office shook suddenly and jiggled up and down, but the elastic material kept them from falling in. Renjou ran up to Sam and pulled him under one of the desks. They waited while everything around them wobbled. A few paintings flew off their decorative hooks on the wall and landed on the sofa across the room. The whole building was swaying like a reed. An explosion sounded below. It seemed to be coming from beneath their feet. Then all was silent as before, with the exception of the blaring fire alarms.

"What the hell was that?" Renjou said, when it had quieted down somewhat. He helped Sam get out from under the desk. Michael and a security officer ran into the room.

"Are you all right?" the officer asked.

"Yeah," Renjou replied for both of them.

"What happened?"

"They sent a missile at us again," Michael said. "They said..."

Another, milder jolt shook the building.

"Goddamnit!" Renjou swore, almost knocked off his feet.

When they were all downstairs, Sam took Renjou aside.

"That's what I was telling you about, Renjou," he said. "She's hacked into the Metro's system. You think it's a coincidence? I have it all tracked. The Metrodome was attacked on the day she started waking up."

"Is that why you froze her?" Renjou asked.

Sam nodded. Another jolt and the lights in the room went dim.

"I gotta tell you, Sam...it's not working."

MYSTIC

Renjou Bosco did not believe in ghosts, spirits, zombies, fairies, and many other things, including, but not limited to, psychics. However, as the attacks on the Metro intensified over the next few days, he felt compelled to do something. His team had found nothing wrong within the network. Secretly, even from Sam, Renjou sent two of his own agents to a psychic reader named Snade-Mystic. The new location of Snade's Mysterious Mystery Parlor was currently between the 5th and 32nd streets. The recent shelling had destroyed the rest of the city blocks in this neighborhood.

When the agents, two very serious people dressed in archetypal black, arrived at the scene, they began to doubt their boss's intentions. Still, it was their job, and they went in. Due to the recent power surges, the lights were dim and flickering at the entrance to Snade-Mystic's Mysterious Parlor, but as soon as they got closer, the neon coils lit up, shocking away some dead flies from the sign's screen.

The letters turned from red to green, and read, "Snade - Mystic. Come in."

Debbie, one of the agents, looked over at her partner Miklee in doubt. He was looking at the gaudy sign and slowly pulling on one ear. They were both hesitant to go in.

"You sure that's the place?" Debbie asked.

"I guess so," replied Miklee, and stopped pulling on his ear. "It has to be."

* * * *

Snade sat at the table in the small, dimly lit room. His face was lit up by the green glow of the magic sphere, and his eyes, which were mostly concealed beneath the overhanging dreadlocks, were closed. He opened his eyes to the sound of loud knocking on the front door of the mysterious parlor.

"Come in!" he yelled at the door, and the knocking subsided. The door opened and Debbie and Miklee entered, looking about them somewhat wildly.

"Uh, Mr. Snade?" Miklee began.

"Yes?" replied Snade.

"We would like to ask you some questions," Miklee said, as dryly as possible.

Snade shrugged. "That's what I'm here for. Be my guests, have a seat," he invited, with a flourish of his hand. Debbie and Miklee quickly seated themselves on two rickety, wooden chairs.

"So?" Snade said. "Where are the questions?"

"Well, we need to ask you about the recent events, those attacks on the Metro," Debbie began, adjusting her necklace.

"Oh yes, the attacks..." Snade intoned slowly. "What would you like to know about them?"

"Who is responsible for them?" Miklee asked.

"Nobody knows," Snade replied.

"We were hoping you could use your skills to help us, Mr. Snade. The situation is, frankly, quite desperate," Miklee admitted, staring emptily at the green glowing sphere.

"Well," Snade said, at length, "I suppose I can help you. How much do you charge?" He said sarcastically.

"Fifty NKU is the best we can offer," Debbie said, opening the briefcase. "Presuming, of course, that the information you give us is accurate."

"Fifty?" Snade peered into it carefully, as if it were the mouth of an alligator. He brushed back his dreads with one hand. "All right," he said with ease, and dragged the crystal ball noisily across the surface of the table. He waved his hand over it ceremoniously. "I have good news and bad news," he announced, after a minute or two of hesitation. "Which do you want to know first?"

"The bad news, Mr. Snade," Miklee said, somewhat dryly.

"All right, the bad news is...Dabel," Snade said, matching Miklee's tone.

"Dabel is dead, Snade," Miklee said.

"No, he's not. He's alive and well. He's causing the attacks on the Metro." Snade tiredly shook his head, and the orange dreadlocks fell about his shoulders. When he raised his head, Miklee noticed that his insane green eyes were heavily outlined in black. Snade blinked them several times for emphasis. "He's been using that muppet, I mean puppet, Leon. He's got into Rosie now, too."

At this, both Debbie and Miklee raised their heads.

"How do you know about Rosie?" Debbie asked him.

"I'm a psychic reader, lady. Didn't you read the sign?"

Both Miklee and Debbie got up from the table.

"Hey, don't you wanna hear the good news?" he asked. They turned to look at him. They were already at the door. "I've just got my third eye. That's how I know the bad news! Hahahaahaa!"Debbie went out, but Miklee still lingered in the doorway.

"Hey, you going to pay me, or what?" Snade yelled.

Miklee returned with the briefcase. He set it down on the table and looked for a moment at Snade, whose eyes seemed to glow in the dark.

"Did...did you just get that from the sphere?"

"Yeah, sure, from the sphere. Incidentally, if you're going to arrest me, I'll be here until about seven. Then I have a little commitment to attend."Miklee backed out of the room.

NEWS

According to the investigation, Sam died in his sleep. The reason: a massive, instantaneously lethal stroke to the right side of his brain. On the same day, Nina's cryopod went missing.

Later that day, Renjou went upstairs and sat for a while in Sam's old office. He didn't know what to think.

The situation in the Metro was only worsening. Renjou's staff was working around the clock inside the bunker to trap the virus, while the ground above them shook with sonic booms from the raids. The city was in ruins. At this time, nobody knew for sure if the missiles kept firing in error or in attack and defense, not even those people in charge of firing the missiles.

The folks who could afford it fled to the Orlando, but even the Seventh Palisade was not a safe place anymore. After the purposeful downing of a large Dutch Delta, a passenger ship carrying refugees from the Maine, there was no more talk of peace or even negotiation. The situation, which began as a simple system error, had escalated to a full-scale war among the Palisades. Everyone was involved now: the SRI, the Parliament, the UPI and all the branches and sub-organizations of the Eclecti sprang into the conflict. Even those branches and sub-organizations that, during regular times, advertised only peace, had somehow developed armed divisions and a steady supply of missiles and other weapons.

Then, the attacks abruptly stopped. No one knew what to make of it. Suddenly, it became very quiet in the city, and the sky gradually cleared of the scarlet clouds that had become a routine and almost natural part of the skyscape around the Metro. No one knew what was happening, and whether it was a cause for celebration or just a pause before another round of attacks.

By the middle of the day, in the midst of this suspicious silence, Miklee came back to report the news from Snade's Parlor.

"This is all we know as of right now," Miklee said, after he'd finished his brief report. In truth, he did not have anything to report at all. The information Snade had given was still the best they had found, but discussing it with Renjou might be difficult.

"We don't know what's causing it," Miklee offered.

"Well, find out, goddamnit! What is this?" Renjou was becoming even less patient than he usually was. One corner of his mouth twitched constantly, with a consistent, almost mechanical regularity.

Miklee was unsure of how and whether he should proceed. At length, he said, "It's a virus, but it's not Rosie."

"What do you mean?"

"Snade said... He said that it's Dabel."

Renjou gave him a skewering dark look. "Dabel's dead. I made sure of that."

"But, sir, Snade said...he said that his third eye's just opened and..."

"Well then it opened in the wrong place. I personally destroyed any last fragments of that virus." Renjou refolded his hands under his chin methodically.

"He also mentioned Leon..."

"And?"

Miklee shrank back a little. "He said...he said Leon is being used somehow by...Dabel. He said that Leon hacked into Rosegate and somehow set him loose."

"How does he know about all this, anyway?" Renjou asked.

"I don't...know, sir. He's a little...""Bring him back."

"Who? Snade?"

"Leon."

NOKIDA

Leon was brought back to Nokida for questioning the next day. Two agents who belonged to the SRI border patrol unit took him off the tram to Willowcreek at Tessla. They placed him into a largely metallic, reinforced safety cage and drove him away in an armored car.

By noon, he had arrived again at Nokida. He was wheeled in through the back door to avoid any drama, as tends to happen in these situations.

"How do you stop it?" Renjou asked him. The room was small and brightly lit. Two assistants were helping Renjou, who was sitting in a chair opposite Leon.

Leon's mask had become detached and had partly fallen off his face. He was bleeding from the mouth.

"I don't know," Leon said in a dead voice, and immediately received a jolt through his right hand. Renjou's face hovered over his. It had small, sparkling, dark eyes, set deep like pieces of obsidian in the mask of an idol. By contrast, his face was soft and round. If not for those two stark pieces of equipment, it would have been almost a good face.

"I won't let you go, Leon," he said, "until you tell me how to stop it. You understand that, don't you?" He looked for a while into Leon's eyes.

Leon nodded weakly. Renjou suddenly pulled away.

"Get him some water and clean him up," he said to his assistants.

In about fifteen minutes, Leon was sitting at Renjou's desk, supported at either shoulder by the two orderlies. His hands had been bandaged, and he was dressed in a new, clean shirt. He was staring absently at the black and white checker-patterned floor.

"Well?" Renjou said, and Leon looked up at him with bloodshot eyes.

"All right," Leon said. "I'll tell you."

Renjou leaned forward with ready interest, placing his chin to rest on his folded hands. Leon noticed a glint of black on one of his fingers. It was a completely black stone, square in shape.

"I...it's like an...onion..." Leon began."What do you mean it's like an onion?" Renjou asked him, and switched his hands beneath his chin."It's a...I made it like a...a set of nesting dolls," Leon said dully. Renjou sniffed his nose. "There's another program at Rosie's inner core. It's causing all the damage." He looked, for the last time, at the evasive checkered floor. "It's Dabel."

This caused a visible stir among Leon's scanty audience, which included the two assistants, a nurse, and Renjou. Renjou's eyes sparkled darkly, matching the stone.

"And how do you get to this inner core?" he asked.

"You can't," Leon said.

"Why not?"

"It's a trigger switch."

RAT TRAP

Nokida's building came under attack next. The Metro kept firing remote missiles randomly, almost on a whim, and although most of the missile silos had already been disabled, the weapons kept appearing. The city was eating itself like a rabid dog, and was now starting on its neighbors. The surrounding Palisades fired back despite the protocol. There were no rules anymore, and no one seemed to care for the reason.

Each day, swarms of Vesper rockets flew through the sky, spreading their scarlet tails. The Metro often intercepted these smaller missiles and they disintegrated upon impact, raining down in fiery black fragments over the Metro and the Reaches. No one knew where they were coming from. It was the most anonymous terrorism the city had ever seen.

Leon was asleep. He was sleeping inside the bunker located in Nokida's basement, even as the walls shook and trembled all around him. They moved everyone down there as soon as the attacks began. The whole building reverberated under the shelling. Most of its windows had been shattered, and, when the sun was setting over the city, they looked like broken teeth or missing eyes. By nightfall, the upper part of the Nokida building had been destroyed.

Leon was heavily drugged and oblivious to everything now. He was sleeping in a sleep he hadn't experienced for months, ever since the trouble began. A deep, blissful sleep, during which he saw absolutely nothing at all.

Meanwhile, down in the basement, Mike and EZ were working their way in. They had finally tracked down Leon. This really was their last chance, or they would once again have to find a new employer.

Mike watched as EZ hacked the lock. The tips of EZ's fingers contained all kinds of blades, picks, screwdrivers, and other equipment, including a custom, antique dental pick and a snake camera that would have made any Swiss knife rust with jealousy. He opened his hand out into a metallic lady's fan and flipped through the various items like a surgeon selecting his tools. EZ's red, round shades dimly reflected the hallway lamps as he picked at the locked door. Somewhere far above them, another tremor shook the ground, and the little hallway lamps swung in unison at the jolt. Mike and EZ looked up searchingly at the ceiling, but this tremor was a brief one. EZ wiped the falling dust off his shades and returned his attention to the door. It was a complex electronic lock, and he had to take out its innards before he could effectively zap it open. The lock finally opened, but this room only led to another door.

"Oh, come on," Mike said. "This is the fifth motherfucking door, what is this place, a rat trap?"

"Easy," EZ said, pricking up his ears. The soft parts of his ears looked translucently bluish by the moonlight of the single lamp inside the corridor.

"If this won't work, I brought a crowbar just in case," he added.

"That won't do, these are fancy locks," Mike said, frowning. "We're fucked."

EZ heard someone in the hallway and pulled Mike with him into an alcove in the corridor's wall. A security officer was coming down the hall.

When he got close enough, EZ whacked him on the head with the crowbar, rifled through his pockets, and found a key card. He looked up at Mike. "See?" he said.

They reached the detention cell at the end of the long corridor. Leon was asleep.

The cell was locked with a relatively simple, and somewhat archaic, mechanism that bolted open quickly under EZ's hand.

Mike shone his beam into Leon's face. His pupils showed no reaction: they were widely dilated and pitch black.

"Rosie?" Leon suddenly inquired.

"Nope," Mike said. "We'll have to carry him."

He picked up Leon over his shoulder, and they left the building.

SHUTTLE

Leon, still half drugged, was seated between his two consorts inside the shuttle. The interior of the shuttle reeked of authenticity. If Mike and EZ didn't know any better, they'd think the tram line was operated by Mr. Vincent too. The dark brown, faded cabin had rusty walls that smelled of past leaks. It was gloomy and breezy inside; a few round, yellow ceiling lamps glowed mutely on the overhead panel. Old magazines and advertising leaflets flew about randomly through the cabin. Although it was very cold, a few people lay sleeping on the floor - probably the local junkies. A few others dozed on the seat across from Mike and EZ and their charge. One of them was sleeping with his head in the lap of another, who sat in a mute stupor, staring at the floor. He was foaming at the mouth. He raised his head once and looked straight ahead at the space occupied by Leon, but chances were that he that wouldn't remember anything at all.

Halfway to the Metro, there was trouble: a conglomeration of police hovers around a street intersection. Scattered in a wide radius from its foundation lay the broken, charred remains of a small tenement building. Mike and EZ did not feel like showing up, but they didn't have much choice. They pretended to be sleeping like the junkies next to them and covered Leon with a dirty sheet of newspaper. It worked; the officer who scanned the cabin didn't so much as look at them. The camouflage was very authentic, but they couldn't go any further into the city. The police would be poking through every vehicle that went by now.

They jumped off when the shuttle had slowed down a bit on its climb up the hill out of the Reaches. In the decrepit, ancient station they bought tickets from an old-fashioned ticket machine, which also dispensed candy as well as, occasionally, plastic garbage and bottled water, and waited for the air ship. It descended into the station a good forty-five minutes late, creaking on its cables. Its hull was running with leaks and rust and its windows looked like they had cataracts, but this was a place that guaranteed anonymity for a relatively low fee. This was the Lady Stardust, a rustic gambling ship, with a capacity for 700,000 guests and then some.

They rented a cabin and told Leon, who was just starting to wake up, to keep quiet and wait.

VINCENT

"Where is he?" Mr. Vincent asked, when he saw Mike and EZ returning, once again, empty-handed.

"We're hiding him out onboard the Lady Stardust," Mike replied.

"What's that?" inquired Mr. Vincent, tenderly removing a roach that had crawled onto one of his upper eyelids.

"Just some swanky club ship full of strippers," EZ said, staring at the mechanical clock above Mr. Vincent's head: its archaic dial was covered with dust. The finely curled lattice of the fat arrow pointed to three in the afternoon, even though it was already six.

"Bring him here," Mr. Vincent said worriedly. He had already paid in half to these drones, and was under the assumption that Leon was with them. He was beginning to have his doubts.

"We will, Mr. Vincent," promised EZ. "Give us a few more days. The cops are all over the place right now - we have to wait out a bit more. We won't fail you," he added.

"You better not," Mr. Vincent replied, and tightly shut most of his eyes in contempt.

THE LADY STARDUST

Leon woke up in the middle of the next day. He had only a vague recollection of the day before. He remembered the detention block, someone's wiry hand in a black glove, the strange glint of EZ's dark red shades, and one or two junkies from the cabin inside the shuttle. At first, he thought that he was being transported to prison, but a look at the decor told him otherwise. Everything in this room was gilded in cheap metal. Even the toaster had a decorative design on its side, which made it resemble a gold tooth grille. It seemed to be grinning at him from the counter. He rolled over, causing one blanket to fall off the bed, and inspected the other side of the room, which was outfitted similarly. This used to be a gaudy and flashy sort of place back in the day, but now it was just rundown. There was a long, deep, and rather structural-looking crack spanning almost the entire length of the cabin's floor.

He looked out of the window.

The massive, creaking ship floated slowly and diligently in its low orbit around the Reaches, picking up and parting with passengers as they came and went above the Metro. Small, checkered hovercraft buzzed around this ship like bees around their hive. Occasionally, their sides scraped the side of the ship, and the belly of its lower deck was streaked with long skid marks of various colors.He was supposed to stay in this room and wait for Mike and EZ. For five days, Leon did just that. On the fifth day, he began to get worried. What if they'd forgotten about him? What would be the best, the smartest thing to do? To wait, of course, but for how long? He paced about the room. The ship creaked lazily all around him. The roaches watched him from their crevices inside the walls. It was becoming impossible to stay here any longer. On the seventh day, Leon went outside.It was a mistake.

He went down into the lobby to take a look. He'd never been in this sort of place before. The gilded, neon-choked lobby led to a club, one of many on the ship. The one Leon visited was called SynSophia. It contained an oval-shaped lounge, a bar and, true to the advertisements at its entrance, strippers. Most of them were Dolls. For some reason, the Dolls were particularly attracted to Leon, although he made no indications of wanting to mate with them. The giggling Dolls quickly surrounded him as soon as he walked into the room. He tried to get away, but they snatched at his clothes, and their long-legged, flashing eddy soon took him in.

Leon woke up later on a sofa in the private area of the lounge. It was lit softly by green floating lanterns. The lanterns, simple robots with only one task in their life, also seemed to be following Leon. They formed a little circle around him while he was out. He waved them off like annoying insects, but they tailed him out of the private lounge and kept drifting after his every step. Soon he got out of the club and ran back to his room. He let the elevator sort it all out by using Mike's keycards, and the round platform eventually dumped him at the right junction.

As he turned the corner into the hallway, which was empty, he thought that he heard someone approaching, but when he looked around, there was no one in sight. He shrugged and went inside his room. He wanted to take a shower and get rid of the synthetic scent of the Dolls. He had already taken off his shirt when he heard someone in the doorway. He turned. It was York.

"Hello, Leon," York said, balancing a cryogun. It was heavy and his hand kept slipping down onto the trigger.

"York...I..." Leon began.

York was eyeing him with cold humor. "I'd like to ask you something," he said, tipping up the frost-covered muzzle of the weapon. "Why'd you do it?"

"Do what?" Leon said.

York placed the gun briefly on Leon's collarbone. "You know what you did, so cut the crap. Why'd you set Rosie free?"Leon stared at York, but didn't answer.

"I just want to know," York said, and Leon saw his finger flip up the first trigger ring.

"I wanted to help someone," he said. "I don't know. How'd you get out?"

"A glitch," was the curt reply. "Anything else you wanna tell me?" York said, flipping the second ring loose.

"No," Leon said, and made a quick dart for the gun.

York twisted away from him, but stumbled on the large crack that ran through the floor. He fell backwards without letting go of the gun. Leon attempted to wrest it away, but York was stronger: he recovered, threw him off and fired. Leon fell back in an icy cloud of dust.

ROOM 44,307

When Mike and EZ returned to pick up Leon, they were struck by the disorder inside room 44,307. Several tables and chairs had been turned upside down, and there was a large pool of cryogenic fluid on the floor leading up to the can.

"Leon?" Mike called, holding onto a zapper just in case.

"He's here," he heard EZ's voice say from inside the bathroom.

Mike didn't have much experience in forensics, but he knew when someone was dead.

"Shit!" he said. This was unexpected. He thought about Vincent, and by a natural extension, of his former boss.

"That was a cryogun," Mike noted. "Who the hell lugs these around now anyways?"

"What are we gonna do?" asked EZ. It was a largely rhetorical question. He moved closer and crouched by the side of Leon, or what was left of him, anyway, and it was not a lot. He leaned down and put his head next to Leon's, which had survived the blast, strangely enough.

"Hey, Mike!" EZ's face brightened up a bit. "He's still here!"

DOC

While it was not possible to get a new real body for Leon, there were other options. They placed Leon's most vital remains into a canister and took off to look for Doc.

Doc was asleep when they called. He was dreaming of a wonderful place where there was no police, no criminals, and no noisy attacks on the city and plenty of hash. A miniature collection of various smoking paraphernalia adorned the walls of his office. The decor also included the mounted horns of a reindeer and a collection of giant, petrified blue butterflies displayed under an enormous glass case. Strangely, however, the office lacked the display of any objects that had to do with medicine, anatomy, or science in general.

Doc, whose real name was unknown but was believed to be Mark Hessinger, loved Dolls. He had a collection of them, some older models, some newer ones, and some so antique they had only one function. Most of the Dolls in his house were deactivated, however. He loved only Magda, his companion.

Once, when he was younger, someone asked him why he lived with a Doll instead of a woman. Doc thought about it for some time, then said: "What's the difference?"

The doorbell rang, and Doc went downstairs to take a look. Magda had already opened the door for the guests. She had long dark hair tucked neatly into a bun and looked very homely. She was a classy Doll and wouldn't even give Mike the eye, although he went out of his way to get her attention.

They followed Mark downstairs into his lab, looking a bit warily all around them: this was the operating room, as well as an extensive deactivated Doll repository. Mark kept his less favorite specimens inside a closet, which also housed spare parts. Some delicate-looking arms were suspended from hangers, as well as a few sets of clothes. Several heads were stacked loosely on top of each other, while other disembodied parts were lying in no particular order about this small, usually dark room.

Mark Hessinger had a few uncannily realistic models, including a real beauty, a redhead. She seemed to be alive, even though she was inside a large, illuminated glass display case that stood in the corner of the room. It was an almost unrealistically beautiful girl with pale green eyes and red hair that fell in flames over her shoulders. She was dressed in semi-transparent, pale silver lingerie of flowery lace.

Mike noticed that she had a small, maroon colored tattoo in the shape of a heart on her left thigh - he zoomed in and saw that it was a code. The curly arabesques read: "7587." Unlike the other Dolls in Mark Hessinger's house, she looked completely real. She seemed to be watching them from beneath the glass.

Mike shuddered and looked away."Do you like her?" Doc inquired."Are you sure that's a Doll?" Mike asked.Mark looked at him strangely, but his eyes were smiling: "Yes, it's a Doll," he said. "Just a later model - it's called an All Integrated Synthon, but I like to call her Alice. Never activated. Beautiful, isn't she?" he asked, but Mike didn't reply. "One of these days, I'm going to let her out."

Doc looked over what was left of Leon, poking cautiously through the remains. They still gave off an icy, crystalline blue vapor.

"What can you do?" EZ asked him."Not much," Doc said, scratching his nose. He was a scrawny, middle-aged man wearing a maroon bathrobe and long-nosed red and black Turkish slippers, and reeked of cigarettes and, possibly, hash. "You'll have to get me a new body for this one," he said finally, and shut the lid on the frozen remains.

"Think he'll make it?" Mike asked.

"Maybe," Doc responded. "Get me a Doll and I'll try to put him back together."

"Does it have to be a Doll?" EZ asked.

"Or a drone, it doesn't matter, really," Doc replied, and Mike looked over cautiously at EZ.

DRONES AND DOLLS

Temporarily, Doc put Leon into a life support system that kept his brain going. He could even communicate through a simple set of keys. While it was unknown how long he would last like this, it was worth giving it a try.

Mike and EZ searched the Metro for possible drones, but they were hard to find. Most of them had been removed to the other Palisades to help with the toxic cleanup after the recent attacks. The Metro was now being shelled by two Palisades, the Maine and Kansas, in addition to the random, unpredictable attacks it carried out upon itself.They tried several taxi drivers, but it was no use: ever since the attacks began, they became so wary it was impossible to reach them by any civil means, such as conversation, or by less civil means, through the security glass.

Finally, they tracked down one of them from a bar on the outskirts of the Metro. It was a rustic model. He even had protective red casters on his wheels, which made them resemble roller skates.He rolled along the street rather quickly on them, too, and Mike and EZ had trouble keeping up with him. EZ crossed the street and ran into the opposite alley in the hopes of cutting him off. Mike was following him closely until they reached the intersection of Mason and 52nd. Here the drone stopped suddenly, squealing on his breaks, and changed direction.

He went around the corner and into an alley and suddenly disappeared.

EZ could still see him through his red shades, but Mike could not. The taxi driver knew he was being tailed and had turned off all his body lights as soon as he was in the protective darkness of the alley. They could hear the faint echoes of his wheels and his motors spinning. This one got away.Suddenly there was a loud, metallic clanging noise in the distant end of the alley's mouth. EZ heard, and then saw the drone moving. He was trying to get up, but his foot was trapped in a metal trash chute on the ground. He tried to pull his foot out, but it was no use.

"Get away from me!" he cried, looking around wildly. His eye discs were fully opened and emitted a pale green light. "Hel..."

EZ zapped him quietly, and the drone became still. Only his trapped foot continued to twitch inside the grate. He was trying to pull it back, but weakly now after EZ had disabled most of his motors.

"Please," the drone began, when EZ placed his hand over his head and let go of a quick blue jolt. It lit up the dirty back alley for a moment and scared away a rat. The drone's eyes dimmed out and his face returned to its neutral, default expression.

He was an older model and was a bit heavy, even for Mike. After a few attempts to lift him off the ground, Mike picked up the old drone by his roller skates and dragged him unceremoniously toward the car. Just like living things, mechanical things seemed to get so much heavier when they were out, thought EZ, trying to persuade the loose jumble of parts into the trunk. Another shove and the inert drone tumbled to the bare floor with a sound like a stack of falling tin cans.

They took the old road down into the Reaches. Kamakira Valley was largely deserted at night and was unlikely to be patrolled - no one used that road anymore, especially after daylight hours, as it was too dangerous. EZ shut off all the main lights on their hover and used his night vision to see the road ahead. It was pretty, all in shades of red, blue, and green.

Fifteen minutes on the Kamakira Expressway, and they began seeing colorful lights on their tail: cops. Possibly, border patrol agents, or just local officers, but they needed to get out of there fast.

EZ sped up. They were going about 500 km per hour now, but the lights were pressing closer. The thin, hysterical wail of the sirens reverberated through the valley and shook the cold night sky with its blaring song.

"Stop! Border patrol!" EZ and Mike heard over the loudspeakers, which flew next to EZ's window trying to match the hover's speed. The loudspeakers spat out a tracker, but it failed to stick to the hover's roof, possibly because of all the grime it had accumulated while it was on standby in the Reaches.

"Stop!" The protective panel on the turret began to open. "Last warning. Decelerate right now," the speakers threatened as the turret erected itself on its thin legs.

"Shit!" EZ said, and began to decelerate.

When Mike and EZ's hover came to a stop, they heard a voice from inside the trunk. It was the drone. Apparently, EZ had missed one of his drives while he was deactivating him, and he managed to awake.

They heard a muffled voice, and the sound of someone rattling the trunk panel.

"Shut up!" Mike said.

"Let me out!" the drone cried, kicking the trunk's walls, which resounded with hollow metallic dings.

Mike looked back at the road - the officers were still far behind them, while the turret floated calmly nearby, awaiting the rest of the team. He would have enough time to put the drone to sleep. He got out of the car.

"Easy now," warned EZ. They still needed an intact body.

Mike approached the rear of the hover. Suddenly the trunk flipped open and the drone leaped out of the car. He hit Mike squarely in the face with one of his red roller skates and took off. The loudspeakers flew after him at some distance. He was very fast, clipping at a speed of about 300 km through the desert.

Mike jumped back into the car as quickly as he could and they took off. The hover was struggling from the previous forced burst of speed, and EZ couldn't bring it back up to even 90. He kept on driving, hoping that they might pass off as ordinary smugglers to the police. The colorful lights behind them were quickly getting closer, and Mike and EZ prepared for the worst: a fight with the cops.Strangely, the police passed them by. They did not seem interested in Mike and EZ at all. Instead, they went after the roller skating drone, their sirens blaring away in the distance.

Only the loudspeakers continued their pursuit. They hovered alongside Mike and EZ's hover and wouldn't let up. This one looked like it had no cameras, but for the sake of safety Mike fired a full clip into its square, noisy face. The loudspeakers sank to the ground.

"You see them?" EZ asked, barely turning. They were doing a good 300 now on the hover, which had recovered somewhat from its earlier race.

"No, I think we got ahead," Mike said, shaking on the rough road. In a few minutes, they heard the annoying wail again.

"Goddamnit!" Mike said, and climbed over to the back of the hover. He opened the rear window, trying to get a good shot at the thing. The flying speakers were badly damaged and were now flying lopsidedly, but the turret was persistently unfolding itself once again. This was the beginning of the Reaches, and they were entering the streets. It was risky to go so fast here, and Mike decided to mention it to EZ.

"You better..." he began.

Mike did not finish. There was a thin, Valkyrie-like squeal of tires and the hover went off like a spinning top into a tree.

The hover rolled over from the impact and bent the artificial decorative pine tree in half. After a few moments, it slowed down in its rolling and spinning and came to a stop. It stopped on its top, rocking gently from side to side. The speakers were nowhere to be seen.

EZ climbed out of the driver's seat. He looked for Mike, who was lying upside down in the back seat. His neck discs were emitting loud, clicking noises of protest, but he was otherwise undamaged. They climbed out of the hover, and, pulling together, returned the vehicle to its natural position on the road. They were somewhere among the outer parts of the Reaches and there were no houses in this area, fortunately.They looked around: there was no one in sight. Well, no one except a Doll. She was lying in the middle of the road. Oil was dripping from one side of her neck. Mike kneeled down and tilted her head back and forth in his hands: he was checking for the severity of the injury. Her toes and long, green-nailed fingers responded to this test. She had pale red hair and big, light-green eyes. A later model. Mike grinned."You bastards," the Doll said, and went out.They quickly stuffed the Doll into the trunk of their car and left the Reaches.

They brought her to Doc, who looked her over and immediately identified the exact make and model: "Saturn 600, name's Mary," he said. "They made 'em all the way up until the early 3000's, but then they decided the design was too slim." Doc grinned. He was a very strange man.

The Doll came to life again in just a few days. It first opened its big green eyes on the table in the operating room, and the first thing it saw was Mike's face hovering over it with curiosity. After some tweaks and adjustments to its sensors and motors, the Doll began to move in a more or less coordinated way and got up off the operating table on its own, although it nearly fell down after that. Mike caught her up just in time. It had no facial expressions yet due to a lack of effort on Doc's part, but it moved about with more and more precision with each step.

Soon Leon became fully mobile. His face supported a variety of expressions, and, thanks mostly to the efforts of Mark Hessinger, he was dressed like a Doll, too: he looked like a streetwalker from the 1920's.

All in all, Doc did a great job.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" Leon was looking at himself in the mirror.

"What's the problem, Leon?" Mike asked.

"It's a girl's body, you morons!"EZ shrugged.

"Hey, it's a good-looking girl's body," observed Mike.

"I'm a drone!"

"Welcome to the family," Mike said, grinning. "Although technically, you're a Doll now."

* * * *

"Who's this?" asked Mr. Vincent. He stared at Leon, who blinked mechanically at him. The eyelashes were very long and the blinking movement was purposely delayed to seem languid.

"That's Leon," Mike responded.

Mr. Vincent was not amused. He was about to shout, "Kaine! Security!" when EZ intervened, raising his hand up like a traffic cop: "Mr. Vincent, that really is Leon. He's hiding from the police, he will explain."

Mr. Vincent rubbed the top of his head with a tentacle, dislodging a youthful looking smaller roach. "Right," Mr. Vincent said, squinting.Leon coughed. He hated his voice.

"I'm Leon," he said to Mr. Vincent, who blinked once and with only one eye. "It's just a temporary disguise. I worked for Nokida before, and can create as well as hack. Please give me a chance."

Mr. Vincent looked at Leon more carefully with his myriad black eyes. A small roach that had crawled onto his shoulder stood up suddenly on its hind legs like a dog and looked Leon straight in the eye.

"Very well," said Mr. Vincent. "I'll give you a chance. I will need you to start tomorrow, this can't wait."

"Yes, Mr. Vincent," Leon replied.

The next day, Leon began working for Mr. Vincent. His first task was to hack the remote database that belonged to Mackenzie's Pest Control. It was easy and Leon did it in about ten minutes. Mr. Vincent almost squealed when he saw some of his worst enemies' private data floating freely across the screen. He rubbed his tentacles together in delight, hissing pleasurably to himself. Over the next few weeks, Leon gained even more respect from the Roach King. Mr. Vincent was so happy and radiant it scared away the roaches.

Leon was treated and paid well, and remained mostly loyal to his new employer. He spent his days chasing data that Mr. Vincent later used to intimidate, silence, or blackmail his friends, enemies, and clients, especially if the last complained of insects in the Time Hotel. The machine Mr. Vincent had brought especially for Leon was brand new, with a state of the art, although still peculiarly uncomfortable, receiver or "hacker's chair," and specially coated, non-stick electrodes that did not sting his scalp or leave him with burned fingers, not that it was a concern to him anymore. Being a drone had its advantages. Leon could enter the void much more easily now and move about there freely. His only concern was getting caught by the SRI, as he was an unregistered Genie, as they called them - a human brain in the body of a drone, which had to have a special license in order to operate, or even exist in the first place.This time was also a relatively peaceful stretch for the Metro and the other Palisades, as the attacks slowly began to cease. Parts of the Metro began to be rebuilt from the rubble, and some of the people started moving back into the city. They were mostly concerned for their property, which stood abandoned for almost a month. Even with the latest security systems, there was no guarantee of safety. There was word that the virus had been stopped, but it might have been only a hopeful rumor. Nobody knew for sure, including Leon.

Being a Doll didn't suit Leon, for many reasons, but it was better than having no physical body at all. The last few days he'd spent inside that "jar" were terrible. Sometimes he had a feeling of being disconnected from his new body, probably the result of some loose connections, but it was far more preferable than being only a brain in a bottle.Ever since he joined the ranks of the drones, Leon stopped seeing Nina at all. Instead, he had strange dreams of being inside some sort of manufacturing facility. He called it the Doll Factory in half-jest. He had no body, human or drone, and flew through the aisles of this place freely, looking through the various drones and Dolls, which were arranged in rows upon rows of rising shelves. This place reminded him a little of Nina's round room, because each drone and Doll was housed inside a white, pod-like structure. There were many of them. The tiers rose in rings to the very top of the domed ceiling.

He was searching for something there. He did not know what it was. Looking at the dead faces of all these drones was a bizarre experience. He was looking, but he never found it.

MR. VINCENT'S IDEA

A large round had destroyed an extensive part of the Time Hotel. There was no loss of life, with the exception of the roaches, which inhabited the eastern walls of the establishment, but it left a big dent and left the enormous Sauna Suite useless. Mr. Vincent was saddened, but he was also preoccupied with a certain idea at the moment, an idea which, if executed correctly, could solve many of his personal and financial problems at once, and, perhaps, lead to a new sort of order in the world.

"If we had this virus," Mr. Vincent said, his wet eyes twinkling darkly in their multiple shallow sockets, "why, we could have anyone at out beck and call. The SRI. The government, the president. Even the Allied Pest Committee!"

Mr. Vincent was pacing about the room. He found this idea tremendously exciting. His tentacles dragged after him languidly as he walked, resembling the long hem of a lady's gown, and curled with a flourish when Mr. Vincent turned to walk in the opposite direction.

"Is it possible?" he asked Leon.

"Well, no one can get to it," Leon said, without looking up from his machine. He was wired fully, but had not yet entered void mode, which is why he could still hear Mr. Vincent. The smooth tipped cups of the electrodes dangled loosely from the ends of his fingers, moving like blind snakes seeking to snap onto the knob-covered surface of the hub, which looked a bit like the roll of an antique music box.

"Just think, Leon! The things we could do! Why, I would build another hotel just for the roaches!"

"A good idea, sir," Leon said indifferently.

"But can you do it, Leon?"

Leon sat back in his uncomfortable hacker's chair. For some peculiar reason, his eyes followed the spanning, thin chains of electrodes that descended from his head and arms. "Well, it is very difficult, but I could try. I would like to put a stop to these attacks."

"Yes, yes," agreed Mr. Vincent. "Such violence...terrible, just terrible," he said, and went out of the room, quietly hissing a tune, "Sleep, my sweet arachnid, don't you cry, for someday you will be big and many-eyed..." It was a song, a lullaby his mother sang to him when he was just a baby and had only three big, black eyes in the middle of his head, was soft to the touch and could barely move his tentacles around. Whenever Mr. Vincent was sad, depressed, angry, happy, or just plain drunk, he would hiss out that particular tune.

THE GENIE

To trap even a part of Dabel, Leon needed a container.

"So how do you suppose to do it?" Mike asked.

"You know that story about the genie?" Leon said while pulling off a glove studded with blinking electrodes. He threw it onto the table, but it did not quite make it there and landed on the floor.

"Yeah, sort of. The genie is hiding inside the lamp, right?" Mike said, picking up the fallen glove."That's it, and once he's out, he won't go back inside no matter what, but there must be ways to trick him into doing it."

"What does this Dabel look like, anyway?" EZ asked.

"He's...beautiful," Leon said. "But it's not yet complete - if he was, we'd all be dead by now." Leon folded his hands in front of him meditatively.

"He's looking for his final trigger, but there is no way to know which one it is, unless I could actually somehow meet him and ask him, but I don't think that would be a good idea. Once he finds it, it will allow him to link directly to any power source. He will shut down everything then."

EZ thought about it, and then said, "What about Rosie, can that be of any use?"

"No," Leon said. "Rosie is too weak. After she hacked into Rosegate, she got a little fried and lost most of her grip."

"Why did you hack it, by the way?" Mike asked.

"I wanted to wipe out my record at Somas," Leon answered, fidgeting absently with a loose silver-coated cable.

He stood up and started pacing about the room. Mike and EZ watched him from the sofa. Mike was worried too, naturally, but the sight of this Doll brought on many other thoughts.

"There is a way," Leon finally said, and stopped pacing about. He stopped in the middle of the room, for some reason pointing at the ceiling. "I know of a way to lure him, and he just might fall for it." Leon did not recall when he first began referring to Dabel as a "he" instead of an "it." Mike and EZ waited with patient interest.

"He's not yet complete - he's looking to rebuild himself now. If I can lure him into it somehow, say, with a segment, any segment or even with a fake dummy program, we'll have Dabel in a box." Leon scratched his head mechanically, having said that. What box? He thought.

"That sounds like a plan," Mike said, "but do you have the code?"

"No," Leon said, "but I can make one. I will need a memory bank."

"How big?"

"Six Z's"

"What for?" EZ asked, surprised at the required capacity.

"Just in case he's a little bigger than we think."

"Any brand preference?" Mike asked.

"No, anything after 3080 will do."

Mike and EZ were gone the whole day.

Later that night, EZ brought Leon a little box. It was about the size of a hand and looked like an early model Betelgeuse. "How about this?" he said, setting it on the table beside Leon's hacking chair. Leon raised himself from his reclined position on his elbows and surveyed the device. It was badly damaged on one side, as if it had been ripped out of its socket, and its cable looked as if it had been chewed off by a dog.Leon scanned the box through the hookup. Mainly, he was looking for cracks, but found none. It was good enough, even if a bit outdated. "Where'd you get it?" he asked EZ."Eh, I don't remember. It was just lying around the room," he said, failing to mention that it was stolen from a private house in the Maine Palisade during one of the recent attacks.

"Well, I suppose I can give it a try," Leon said, and connected himself once again to the machine.

* * * *

Over the next few months, Leon made all kinds of proxies, dummies that only looked like Dabel but were not the real thing. He could have replicated one of the real pieces, but he was afraid. He did not want another true bit of Dabel falling into the wrong hands. Unfortunately, Dabel was either very clever, or still very weak. He was wary and would not even come near these dummies.

Mr. Vincent was getting impatient: Leon was spending more time away from all his other duties, while the Roach King had a growing list of people he wanted hacked. Leon told him it would be a matter of just a few more days, after which he passed out in his hacker's chair from sheer exhaustion. He was still hooked up to the machine. Mr. Vincent poked him with a tentacle, but received no response. He sighed and left Leon sleeping where he was. The Roach King's plans of using Dabel as a tool of massive extortion and global control were, it appeared, not coming to fruition any time soon.

DABEL'S LAST STRING

It was Nina, but it wasn't. This thing was not Nina anymore. It was made up of a tar like material, which kept dripping to the ground. The air around it was very cold.

She was holding a small, black box in her hands.

"Nina," Leon called her, and Nina flinched, which caused a few more drops of tar to fall.She suddenly turned away from him."Nina, where are you going?"

She didn't answer. Instead, she took off running with the box.

"Nina! Come back!"

Leon began running after her, but he kept slipping on the greasy strings. Just ahead, he saw Nina slip and fall. He ran up to her. She was sinking, holding the black box above her head. Only her face and hands were visible above the surface of the tar pool, which was alive with thousands of black strings. Leon knelt on the edge of the black pool, trying not to sink into its liquid center. Both Leon and Nina were covered by the writhing, wiggling muck, and Leon began to sink as well, although his sinking was slower and more gradual. He took her by both hands and pulled. The black box fell into the tar pool, and the wriggling strings snatched it up and withdrew with it below the surface.

He tried to pull Nina out of this mire, but it wouldn't let her go. She was sinking down deeper with every minute into the black, liquid center. She wanted to tell him something, and Leon leaned closer. He could feel the tug of the black strings pulling him in and Nina's weakening hold on his arm.

"Help me," Nina said, sinking further.

"What is the code?"

"The code...is inside the box," she said, and let go of Leon's hands.

Leon was about to ask her how to get inside the box when Nina suddenly disappeared below the surface of the tar.

He dove after her.

The dark substance surrounded Leon, was choking him, but the further he sank, the more he saw: there were strange buildings there, like castles at the bottom of the ocean, suspended bridges, airplanes, horse carriages and horses, hovers, clocks, planes, Deltas, and the quickly moving, flying shapes of people that looked like mannequins. They flew past him, all around him, dressed in all manner of clothing from all the different epochs. It's just a giant data dump, Leon thought, as the memory bank regurgitated itself all around him. Snippets of conversations, car horns, train whistles, phone calls, cat calls, applause, a dog barking, laughter, sirens, the beeping of various devices he couldn't identify and the sound of a news broadcast swelled up into a single monstrous sound wave, which rocked him back and forth as he sank. There were people here, too. Many people. Leon couldn't quite see them, but he felt them all around him.

In the middle of all these swirling trinkets and objects, advertising billboards and flying, historically accurate people, Leon saw a bright disc beginning to form. It was somewhat oval in shape and was emerging from the cluttered confusion all around him. In the midst of it, he saw a shape, a girl, a set of white strings, forming a spinning spiral, a something that was and was not Nina.

"Nina!" he called and the bright, spinning disc replied, "Yes."

"What is the code, Nina?" Leon was almost yelling now over the noise of the sound wave. It was also getting terribly hot here. The tornado of shapes was beginning to hurt when it brushed against his skin.

"The code is..." Nina began, and the disc exploded in a bright, superheated flash.

"Inside the box!" Leon heard a voice say, but it was not Nina. He was jolted awake in the hacker's chair. EZ was standing, hovering, over his shoulder. He had one finger inside the machine's power switch and his face was quite literally beaming.

"Leon! You did it! You got it!""What?" Leon was unsure of the cause of the celebration. There was a strong smell of something synthetic burning. Across the room, he saw Mike, who was also grinning happily."You've got the code into it!" EZ said. "See?" He showed him the black box: it was burned on one side \- an oval pattern resembling the bright glowing core in its shape. Leon took off the electrodes, some of which had become partly glued to his skin. Chances were if he were still in his previous body, he would not have survived it. He still couldn't understand what happened and sat in the chair holding the electrode cap emptily in his hands by a loose wire. EZ hooked up the box without connecting it to the network, and it appeared as an innocuous green bar on the screen.When EZ opened it on the machine, Leon nearly dropped his cap. Inside it, he saw the missing code for Dabel. It was Nina.

Except for Leon, no one knew the implications of that, and that it was far from being a cause for celebration. Nina was inside that box now. Either she was Dabel, or someone had hidden away the virus, or a part of it, anyway, within her, perhaps to return to it when they had the chance and the conditions were suitable. If she got access to the network, the final step would be complete. Leon wondered if Nina could really be that thing. Somehow, he didn't think so, but if it got into the wrong hands, which is exactly where it was right now, it could attract, or even worse, purposely call out to Dabel and bring him back fully. Leon could not let this happen. He was already responsible for the attacks on the Metro and the brewing civil war among the Palisades. He was going to try to make amends somehow, or his world would end.

As Leon planned his escape, sitting in the middle of the night in the recliner, he became aware of a certain presence in the room. It was very subtle, but he could feel that there was someone there besides himself and Mike and EZ, who were sleeping, respectively, on a faded red love seat and a defunct, old fashioned hacker's chair with fiber wire "curler" restraints on its armrests which made it resemble some kind of ancient torture device. The invisible guest was somewhere in this room. In fact, it was similar to that thing he saw the first time he approached Rosegate, and seemed to be coming from the direction of the black box, which stood on the built in wall shelf among some miscellaneous, wiry looking knickknacks - a temporary measure until they could take it to Mr. Vincent. The box was emitting a reddish glow. Leon squinted a few times to turn on his night vision and saw that its top was slowly opening into four black petals. Soon he had to turn the night vision off, because the room suddenly became very bright: white prisms were vibrating inside the box's mouth and spilling cheerful rainbows all over the room. EZ groaned in his sleep and turned over in the uncomfortable hacker's chair.

It was Nina, but it wasn't. It looked just like her, exactly the way he'd seen her in his last dream. It was a girl of about fourteen with short, black hair, black eyes, and a somewhat narrow, beautiful face, which was tinted blue and looked as if it had been blurred so that it was difficult to see its individual features. The rest of this figure was made of black, writhing tar. It neared him slowly and reached for his hand.

Leon felt it touch him, and saw its black hand breaking up into multicolored strings, as did his own. The bright threads tangled with Leon's and began to intertwine. Leon felt his hand melting away as it began unwinding into many colorful strands, his mechanical body gradually pulling apart like an old rag doll.

Leon pulled away his hand, and the thing shrank back from him, as if offended. He could see the glowing threads fade as the surface of its hand resealed itself. The floating, poorly described face remained expressionless, and looked at Leon with empty, black eyes. It was hard to believe that this was Dabel, or Nina.

Mike woke up and turned over to one side on the sofa. Leon saw his black shades, in which numerous rainbows were playing. He propped himself up on one elbow and briefly scanned the room, casting a reddish beam across it. He stopped at Leon.

"You still up?" he said, looking right through Nina. He yawned tiredly and looked for a moment at the ceiling. "Why is there a rainbow in here?" he asked.

"You don't see it?"

"See what?"

Leon couldn't find what to say. He watched Nina or Dabel-Nina, draw away from him and slither back inside the container. It went right past EZ's torture chair and silently leapt up onto the wall shelf just above Mike.

"Get some sleep," Mike said, and dropped down again onto the couch.

Leon sat back in the recliner. The room was dark once again, and all he could hear was the quiet clicking coming from inside the box. What did it want by threading with him? He wondered. It was not yet complete, but it was almost there. It obviously wanted his attention and its own last bit of code, which was at Leon's disposal. It knew that, but it also wanted something else.

It's a virus, Leon thought. What does a virus want to do after it rebuilds itself?To reproduce.

Later that night, Leon snuck out of the hotel room. He had hidden the black box inside the lining of his coat. He was heading for Moorsford Bay, a fiery disposal that burned old cars, hovers, tires, and anything else that needed combustion, in a clean and environmentally safe manner. For a small fee, he would be able to ditch that box and prevent it from ever falling into the wrong hands again. Give or take a few months, maybe a few years, they'd catch Dabel again, especially if he was still weak. If he was in full power, he would not have been so wary of the proxies Leon had planted in order to catch his attention. He figured that even if, for some reason, he couldn't make it to Moorsford Bay, he would at least be able to ditch the box in the polluted, slippery river that ran under a bridge along the way. That was the only way to do this thing, he thought, heading for the inferno.

LEON'S ESCAPE

"How did he get away, anyway?" inquired Mr. Vincent. It was still early morning and the roaches were running about the floor hungrily all around him. Benevolently, Mr. Vincent threw them small, bite-size breadcrumbs, which he produced by grinding a fresh loaf of bread in one of his long, mottled grey hands.

Mike and EZ could not find an easy answer."Find out where the box went and freeze him," Mr. Vincent ordered indifferently, toying with a roach."Is there any way we can get a..." Mike began, but Mr. Vincent cut him off:"No," he said, and turned away in his chair.

* * * *

Leon had a feeling that he was being trailed, because he was: just behind him, the mutely stalking Dabel followed. Dabel did not attempt to do anything. He was just missing his last bit.

The little black box kept pressing against his side in the lining of his jacket. It was still early out in the Metro, and the attacks had not yet begun. These days, for some reason, they always started at about twelve in the afternoon, continuing erratically from that time on until sundown. It was as if the virus were a lazy person who woke up late, spent a few hours on attending to their immediate business, and then relapsed again into a peaceful sleep. Perhaps Dabel is weak, Leon thought, which was a good thing: it meant they still had a chance, especially if he got rid of this damned box. It was getting lighter out in the streets, and Leon began to walk faster. The ghostly Dabel was gradually falling back.

Leon did not have enough time to make it to Moorsford Bay or even the bridge. He was intercepted on his way out of the Metro as he was walking down the street. A stranger appeared out of nowhere and zapped him out cold.

"Hand it over," someone's voice said.

There was a strange, unhealthy, heavy smell of something burning.Leon opened his eyes. He was looking into the ugly, blasted muzzle of a Deko gun. On its other end was Mike.

"What'd you do with the box?" he asked, tilting the Deko with one hand. Its red charging discs were spinning quickly, and the lights were blinding Leon's optics.

"I don't have it," Leon said, squinting at the lights.

"No monkey business now, Leon."

"You don't understand," Leon said. "If you let him in, the code will be complete. It must be destroyed."

"No can do," Mike said. He rifled through the pockets of Leon's coat and took out the black container.

Leon shut his eyes. He waited.

When nothing happened, Leon opened his eyes again. Mike had put down the Deko gun.

* * * *

"I just can't kill a Doll," he said, and turned away. He walked down the alley for some time, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. Leon was gone.

Mike kept walking until he reached the entrance to the Metro's subway, the mouth of which was blocked by rubble and twisted metal beams. Its sign, which read, "Entrance - Metro" was now planted vertically and molten to the ground. He picked up a piece of this rubble, a chunk of rock or concrete, he couldn't tell, and looked at it. It was still warm. For some reason, he put it into his pocket. Over his shoulder, he detected some sort of commotion about three or four miles away. He began to walk in the direction of the noise.

"EZ," he said to his transmitter."Did you get it?"

"Yeah, I got it."

"Did you get Leon, too?"

"Yeah," Mike said.

"Uh huh," responded EZ. "There's a party on the corner of 5th and Mason, come take a look."

"What party?" Mike asked, confused."The SRI, the cops, and Leon - come over here, I'll give you the link."

In the next second, Mike received his directions. He saw, or rather, felt EZ from across the street as he neared the intersection. EZ noticed him too and waved him over. They watched from the safety of the alley. The scene was taking place right in the middle of the street.

It was Renjou. "Don't shoot!" he said, and the officers let go of Leon, who was missing his right foot.

A small group of SRI agents had cornered him. One of the officers was holding a black box. Mike looked over at his copy. "Son of a bitch!" his voice suddenly said in EZ's head.

A bright rocket flared across the sky, coloring it for a moment in rainbow-red exhaust fumes that quickly turned into different colors. Mike and EZ withdrew into the shadows of the alley. The rocket exploded nearby, setting off sirens, and sending up a sea of shrapnel on impact. It made scattered Lego blocks of the city's street and destroyed Mason's, a store made entirely of polyframe, judging by the ice like fragments that went flying up into the sky at its location. One of the larger smoking, molten fragments of Mason's landed upright in the nearest street and became glued to the sidewalk.

When the red smoke finally cleared, the box lay on its side upon the dirty ground, and everyone else in a scattered circle around it within varying distance from the center. Leon got to his feet first, immediately followed by Renjou, who darted him a quick and dirty look: Leon was moving closer to the box.

Leon saw Nina moving toward the black container. Unlike the ghostly, tar stained Dabel who lacked a human face this version of Nina was clean. It looked like her, too. No one else seemed to be aware of Nina's presence, with the exception of Renjou.

"Nina!" Leon called her, and made an attempt at interception, but Nina's colorful threads quickly dove inside the box. Leon reached for it.

"Stop!" Renjou yelled, and Leon was immediately pelted with a large fire round from a Deko. An officer who'd just recovered from the blast, but was still off his feet fired it.Instead of falling to the ground, however, Leon did something completely different. Renjou and the officers just watched.

The Doll that housed Leon began to disintegrate right before their eyes into colorful strings, casting peculiar, rainbow-like shadows onto the dirty broken walls of the nearby buildings. The top of the magic box was opening slowly, its petals extending outward. The strings spun around for a moment above the open top of the box, glowing, and spiraling, and then slipped inside it. The black petals of its mouth instantly snapped shut.

When Renjou approached it, the box was emitting quiet ticks, like an old-fashioned mechanical clock. He tried to pick it up, but immediately pulled back: it was so cold it seemed insanely hot. When he could finally touch it, he held it up and turned it in his hands. The little box was black and solid, and heavy like a rock. There was no trace of where it had opened, or where Leon had gone.

A giant sonic boom swept through the alley, and the box almost jumped out of Renjou's hands: an enormous missile had just gone past them, speeding across the sky on its scarlet wings. Mike and EZ shrank into the shadows as the world around them went flying up into colorful bits of things.

THE MAGIC BOX

Leon was running as fast as he could. He was running after Nina. To his right, to his great surprise, he saw Renjou. He was also running after Nina. He was a bit slower than Leon and heavier in his pace, but he clipped along very well.

By the time they saw her, Nina had already taken out the core. The box was in her hands, and its mouth, a perverse, mechanical looking mouth made of four black petals, was slowly unfolding."Nina!" Leon called her at some distance, and Nina looked at him, her face illuminated by a dim, bluish light that flooded calmly from the pitch-black mouth of the box. She moved her hand toward the opening. "Wait! Stop!" Leon stopped some distance away from Nina and they looked at each other. It was strange to see her outside of a dream.

Renjou was still clipping away in the distance. "Stop! Stop her!" he was shouting, and tumbling all over himself.

"I want to wake up now," Nina said. The box was slowly opening and beginning to emit pulses of bright, intense light. Leon looked at Nina's hand: it was mutely entering the code.

"Nina! No!"

The petals flew open. He was instantly thrown back about a mile, if physical distance had any meaning in this place, but somehow he could still see Nina's face. She looked at him. She was crying.

"I want to wake up now. I'm sorry, Leon," Nina said, and put her hand into the black box.

Leon was still running when the world around him went blank.
PART II

KANSAS

When Mike woke up in the back seat of the hover, it was in motion, and he looked up to see who was driving. It was EZ.

Mike sat up, trying to get his thoughts together, but he couldn't. He looked over cautiously at EZ, who was sitting nonchalantly at the wheel. Mike scratched his head and was about to ask him what happened, when EZ turned to him and said, over his shoulder, "I don't know."Mike looked out of the cab's window. They were driving through a lane of colorful, reddish, coral-like trees with crowns of multicolored leaves. These colorful red dwarf trees usually grew in the city's parks, although judging by the dirty, littered road, they were still somewhere on the Metro's periphery. Mike searched his coat pockets for his cigarettes, but he couldn't find them.

"Where are we?" he asked EZ.

"Kansas," EZ replied.

"How did we get here?"

"Beats me," EZ said, and began slowing the cab down to a stop.

They parked right under the lane of the dwarf trees and stepped out of the hover. They stepped out carefully, as if afraid that the paved road would again disappear from beneath their feet.

"So this is Kansas?" Mike looked around. The reddish trees moved about in the warm breeze, rustling their many small, confetti-like leaves, which glittered in the morning sun. The lane of trees seemed to never end and vanished in the hazy, pink-lit distance only due to the effects of regular perspective. The world seemed to be in order otherwise. By the sides of the road lay empty bottles, plastic candy wrappers, and the upturned and sometimes uprooted dank, hollow tubes of the trash chutes.

Mike looked over at EZ, who was consulting his tracking pad. EZ looked up from the screen, half of which was molten to his arm. "We're right in the city center," he said, frowning. It was strangely, almost idyllically empty here - always a bad sign. So far, they hadn't seen a single drone, Doll, or person in the street. "I hope they don't have an anti-drone policy here," EZ said, and they climbed back into the cab.

They kept driving for several hours, but there was still no one in sight. EZ was tired, and Mike took over the wheel.

The sun had already risen and burned away the gentle, pink morning into the shadows. In the distance, the tall, sleek buildings of Kansas City Centre caught the sun on their black solar-paneled wings.

There were almost no sounds, except for the rustling among the tree lanes and the quiet humming of the hover's cooling fans. Occasionally, EZ could hear the subterranean stirring of Greyskins beneath the desolate looking trash piles by the roadside.

They stopped again when they reached the City Centre. Mike and EZ were now walking through downtown. They had never been to the Kansas Palisade before.

This was the Kansas City Historical District, indicated by a large, painted wooden placard. Giant, beautiful magnolia trees grew along the sides of the streets. Sometimes they formed shadowy whispering alleys. The pavement was covered with their fallen white petals and reddish-yellow old leaves.

Everything here looked habitable: the shop windows were lighting up for the evening (it was already about five in the afternoon); the stoplights were working, diligently changing their colors from red, to green, to blue, and yellow. Doors opened and closed by themselves as Mike and EZ neared the shop entrances, but there was still no one in sight. Mike found a charging station near the red brick building of a coffee house, and they went inside the cafe while their hover soaked up.

A small silver bell suspended above the open glass door announced their entrance into the coffee house. Rows of patiently empty tables greeted them inside, and a large Greyskin squealed in alarm and scurried away across the terracotta tiled floor. Mike sat down at one of the tables, while EZ disappeared behind the counter of the antique coffee shop. Mike heard the sound of breaking glass, an extensive spill of some kind of hot liquid, and EZ swearing quietly. The smell of fresh coffee filled the small shop. It would be at least an hour while their hover fed itself hungrily on the power line. Everything seemed to be working here and there was power everywhere, but there was no one around.

What if we're the only ones left? Mike thought, toying emptily with a hard white paper napkin.

"I don't think so," EZ replied from behind the counter. "If there's power, there are people somewhere," he said, pouring himself a black drink.

"You want one?" he asked Mike.

"Sure, why not."

METRODOME

It took them several days to reach the Metro, and at first, they didn't even recognize it. The Reaches still looked much the same, but the city was gone completely.

Here the sky was black and heavy with clouds. Hot, sulfurous smoke rose slowly from the ground, and the air was thick, almost solid, which caused their hover to gasp for breath and rumble constantly. Only the massive, many-topped dark structure of the Metrodome loomed in the distance at the center of the Lost City. Its two largest domes seemed to be flickering with lights. When EZ saw it, he began to cry. Mike took them over the molten grey rubble, smooth and solid as a dead lava flow. EZ's counter was clicking away nonstop here. The radon contamination in the area was almost 95%.

The gigantic towers of the Metrodome were alive with blinking lights. The sun had almost set, and the two minaret-like patrol stations, which rose at the gated entrance to the first dome, cast out strange, pale-green beams, which starkly cut up the dead grey wasteland.

Mike stopped the hover at the front gate. The green beam of the patrol tower crossed them once, pausing silently on their faces. In a second, they heard a thin, cricket-like siren go off, and immediately dove for cover under the dashboard, waiting for the hail, but nothing happened.A pair of flying loudspeakers appeared in the solid dark block of the sky, twinkling like a tooth fairy.

"Your ID," they said, hovering. Small white lights burned star-like on its front access panel.Mike and EZ began to dig in their pockets. A slot opened into a wide grinning mouth in the middle of the loudspeakers' otherwise blank, square face, and Mike and EZ fed it their ID tags.

Minutes later, they saw an approaching hovercraft, guided ahead by the twinkling stars. The solid air made everything suspended in it waver, surrounded by fuzzy haloes. The hover looked a bit outdated and sported uselessly big, long "speed fins" all over its back. The pilot gave a brief wave, and his voice came through in patches of crackling static over the loudspeakers, which were floating next to Mike and EZ.

"Who are you?" the crackling static asked.

"Mike and EZ," Mike responded, using their hover's inbuilt station.

"What's your ID?"

"0101DELTA71-67," Mike said, squinting at the bright, many-colored lights of the patrol hover.

"What about the other guy?"

"01001SIEMENS78-66," EZ replied.

"We don't have you in the db anywhere," replied the pilot, hovering a bit closer.

"Will you let us in?" Mike asked.

"You'll need to detox first. Just follow me."

Mike turned on the hover's power, but it wouldn't start. It didn't respond to anything at all now, even when EZ resorted to an extreme measure: sticking his finger into its ignition ring. It was dead.

"Our hover's dead," Mike said. There was no response from the patrol hover, which waited patiently nearby.

Most likely, it was the charging cells, the most fragile components of any unit - a few bad breaths could damage them, and here they went through about 50,000 km of extreme heat and toxic waste fumes that were seeping out of the ground. Worst of all, they could no longer use their transmitter. The windshield was slowly covering itself up with its opaque, orange eyelid. EZ panicked, trying to jolt it awake, but the thick orange sunscreen kept on climbing. Soon they would lose sight of the pilot, and he, of them.The pilot waited. The speakers floated silently nearby. He tried to call them, then understood what happened and resorted to using an older method.Mike signaled him back. It was an S.O.S.

DETOX

After a few months spent in detox, Mike and EZ were finally allowed to walk the city streets. It was a beautiful place, and, at first glance, one could not distinguish it from a real city. It was like a much smaller copy of the Metro.

The artificial sun came up and shone upon the city inside its protective dome every day. On the outskirts of the city was an almost idyllic rural area nestled among green rolling hills. It contained a few modern processing facilities and power plants, disguised as giant red farm barns. Many clear artificial rivers ran gently through these green fields. There were some nature parks there, spas, hotels, enormous, seemingly endless golf fields full of gophers, a large movie theater inside a carnival-themed entertainment park equipped with a gigantic Ferris wheel - as well as many other recreational attractions. There were even some cows there, but they were a purely decorative (and historically accurate) element that accompanied the green hills. The vast majority of meat and dairy products were artificially synthesized, which was a lot cheaper and faster than growing the actual animals.

The green fields that lay on the outskirts of the Metro finally terminated at the protective inner wall behind a smokescreen of grey, which was the visual occlusion field projected onto the walls to keep the sky looking more natural and three-dimensional from a distance.

The sun rose responsibly and set every day. At night, the twinkling stars came out of their hiding places in the dome's enormous cupola. Sharp at midnight, the full moon emerged to light the streets of the city and the rolling green hills. Both of these celestial bodies went around only in arcs above the city, after which they sank below the earth somewhere among the peaceful pastures, only to rise again on their next cyclical orbits. At close range, the artificial nature of the Moon and Sun was obvious, but at a distance, especially when viewed from the city centre, they looked much like the real thing. The Nogo Needle, which flew up every day from the roof of the Metrodome, was always bounced back, and returned empty-handed like a defeated gladiator.

The first place Mike and EZ were sent to after their time in detox was the Department of Modifications and Virtual Units. They waited for several hours on the round platform before their number was called. Every time the detached female voice announced a number, the giant platform rotated creakily in place. The waiting area was arranged in rows of seats like some kind of gladiatorial coliseum, and occupied by hundreds of people and drones waiting for their turn. A pleasantly feminine, yet somehow infuriatingly genderless and detached voice called out each name and number from inside the tall, glass-paneled hub at the very center of the room. Every time someone was called, the platform would automatically rotate to the matching row and window number. Fortunately, smoking was allowed here, as long as the smoker filtered it doubly with his, her, or its ventilators, and Mike finished about two packs before he started feeling a little queasy.

The big platform finally turned creakily on its gears and brought EZ and Mike to the correct window, which housed multiple black towers and tiers of small boxes. Thousands of tiny, suspended prickly-looking spidery arms went about them constantly, withdrawing and replacing small, dark blue data blocks. EZ and Mike watched as the arm pulled up to them: it was an archaic model, and the data block it carried was as big and heavy as a brick. It dropped the data block declaratively in the depositary on the counter right in front of them.

"Number 847," the machine requested, and Mike handed their tickets to the prickly spider arm with the ambiguous voice.

AUGUSTINE

"I don't understand this," the inspection agent said. He was a small, wiry-looking man with pale skin and sand-colored hair that stuck out loosely like straw in all directions, just like his decorative palm trees. His name was Dr. Jurgen Biengoulalulu, but neither Mike nor EZ could ever remember or pronounce his full name. He wore a long white lab coat, under which was a nauseatingly yellow medic's turtleneck. Dr. Jurgen peered at them with great curiosity through his big round shades, trying to pull out a tack that had become stuck after falling inside EZ's mouth as a result of his earlier investigation. He reminded Mike and EZ of their old Doc, the Doll-lover Mark Hessinger.

"This is very difficult," the doctor said, parting the unresisting jaws of EZ's mouth one last time in an attempt to free the access tack between the sharp screws of his extra fingers.

"What's the problem?" Mike asked him.

"You have no known legal record in our database. And you have all these crazy modifications..." He peered tactlessly into EZ's mouth. "I...I'm not sure if they're even legal. Where did you come from?"

EZ frowned, as the agent shone his pencil-thin red beam right into his eye socket to checkmate him instantly in case he was lying. EZ was lying back in the chair under the bright overhead "halo" lamp, which bobbed above him and Dr. Jurgen. It seemed to be listening with interest. Mike watched the proceedings from his chair in the corner of the room with disgust. He had already miserably failed his test.

"I told you," EZ said, when he had an opportunity to shut his mouth, "I don't remember. We had an..."

Here the inspector suddenly peered in again. "Is that a...Cool-e-Rotor fan in there?" he asked in an amazed tone.

"No," Mike replied for EZ. "It's a Rolodek Advantex."

EZ issued an impatient, quiet martyr-like groan as the inspector began to pry the top lids off the little motors. It reminded him of a long past time, when they were about twelve, and their mother took him and Mike on their first, and last, visit to the dentist. Although EZ was no longer twelve and had no further need for dentists, he felt an irresistible, sudden urge to bite the thin, wiry prying hand that was toying so unabashedly with the cooling fans inside his mouth.

"Marvelous! Absolutely marvelous!" the inspector exclaimed, spontaneously throwing his hands up. "Where did you get it?"

"I told you, Dr..." The name seemed to slip out of EZ's mind immediately, even as he thought it."Jurgen, Jurgen Biengoulalulu," the inspector offered, bowing slightly. "My pleasure, ja?"

"I told you, Dr. Biengu...lulu, I don't know. All I remember is waking up in the Kansas City Palisade. After that, we drove for days and came here."

"What did you do before the war?" Dr. Jurgen asked him.

"Uh...different things."

The inspector frowned, but the thought of EZ's futuristic-looking cooling technology, which was still only beginning to be developed elsewhere, brought him back his usual uncanny cheerfulness. "You are so futuristic, ja?" Dr. Jurgen was smiling almost obscenely happily now, and his upper lip was climbing unpleasantly higher and higher above its usual place below the scraggy, mustache-like little crest. In spite of himself, EZ noticed that his long, thin yellowish teeth were heavily stained. Dr. Jurgen scratched his mustache with one hand, holding his chin thoughtfully, while Mike and EZ tried to think of a good way to get out with an ID tag. It would be the baby step into the city, where they would instantly ditch their legal IDs for fakes and resume their previous careers.

"Doc, what year is it?" Mike suddenly asked, his voice carrying dully from the remote corner.

Dr. Jurgen turned his attention away from EZ and looked over at Mike with a very interesting expression on his face. "What year do you think it is?"

Mike hesitated. "I don't know," he said.

"It's 4499," the good doctor answered, and Mike exchanged a brief but knowing look with EZ. "This is wonderful," Dr. Jurgen resumed. "May I...may I take one?"

EZ shot a look over at Mike again.

"Uh...sure, but..." he trailed off.

"Yeees?"

"Can you give us a break with the Department?"

"Oh, naturally!" exclaimed Dr. Biengoulalulu. "Why do you even ask? Of course!" He grinned and put his left hand up to his heart.

"Between my father and my mother, this is our little secret now, isn't it?" He first looked over at Mike, who was silently brooding in his remote chair in the corner, as the doctor considered him the more suspicious of the two. Then he consulted EZ, and said, "We have a deal then, ja?"

"Sure," EZ said quietly, and Mike nodded in silent agreement from his distant corner of the room.

"That motherfucker took out all my backup drives," Mike said, when they were safely out of the Department building, and out of reach of Dr. Jurgen.

"That's not the worst thing that could happen," the now one-eyed EZ calmly said. He pulled on his empty eye socket gently with one finger, and the protective sealant ring of the orbit came off with a brief metallic snap. "It's just a piece of junk now anyway, after all the detox. We got our IDs now, we'll get new parts."

RENJOU

Renjou was deep asleep. He had fallen asleep some time ago in his chair without disconnecting himself fully from the machine. He was trying to find out what happened, but he couldn't. The year was 4499, the year that marked the end of the Great War. Just as the history books said later on, Metro City was left in ruins, with about 2.5 million people somehow saved inside the Metrodome.

Time travel was impossible; Renjou knew that. All the books said so. If you'd mentioned it to anybody who was anybody in the sciences or any of the even remotely related fields, they'd have laughed at you, and possibly taken away your club membership. Nothing made much sense here.When Renjou first awoke, he fully expected to find himself inside some sort of pod or cryounit, or at the very least, a "brain jar", but he still had his whole body, which worked rather well; it even seemed to him that he felt far better than he did before his last trip. He awoke on a bench in the subway as an officer was trying to get him to leave. The officer was under the assumption that Renjou was a homeless man, and at first crudely poked, then hit him several times with his long-barreled zapper. Renjou, although he still had no idea where he was, immediately responded to the rude officer, knocking him out cold on the subway floor to the terrified screams of a few dozen eyewitnesses.Renjou was quickly apprehended and taken into custody. Only three hours later did Renjou begin to understand where he was. He started being very careful: there were only two ways out of this situation: the jail, or the proverbial loony bin. He made up various things, to the effect that he'd been in an accident, and showed the medics his ID tags, but when they scanned them through the system he was nowhere to be found. Then Renjou recalled that when he was about nineteen, he had a different ID set, several of them, actually - all fakes, which he often used to gain access to various illegal night clubs and other suspect areas of the city - so often, in fact, that a few of them came to function as his actual ID tags later on. They also helped him avoid being drafted into military service at the outbreak of the war, as well as the many annoying routine inspections and medical checks that were a regular part of life for any legitimate citizen of the Metro.

He began to search mentally for the correct combinations of letters and numbers. Finally, the database mercifully produced a match.

A picture of a very young Renjou came up, at a time when he still sported a menacing-looking, curly black goatee and was a member of Gang Teken. It was a relatively loose group without any solid organization or a single leader, and most of its members were kids well under twenty. Their main motif went mostly against the Dolls and the Genies, and they left their mark all over the Metro in the form of their neon-bright graffiti tags.

When the jail medics asked Renjou about the young man who seemed to share his ID number, as well as a slight, eerily uncanny similarity to Renjou, he was at a loss of what to say. Fortunately, for some reason, they did not press him any further about it. They let him go from the jail and sent him into detox - just in case, although Renjou was quite clean when he went through the scan.

After all that trouble, Renjou got a completely new, fake ID set, and went to work at an organization called the Foundry. It was an illicit hackers' group, but Renjou had to have access to a good machine. He wanted to find out what happened to the Metro in 4535, the year he came from, and if it was still possibly happening.

MEETING

"...no, they just took over my db," someone's watery voice said, which Renjou did not recognize. "Very annoying, to say the least. I'm trying to get them."

"What about the synth?" a familiar voice asked. Renjou looked around him, but saw absolutely nothing all.

"It's basically the same as Nina. There are thousands like her. It's the software that bothers me."

"Why do we need her for this, Sal?" Renjou heard Sam's voice say.

"She's a good hacker. Besides, we need someone for this without a jelly brain."

"What about the others?"

"Two more, but we can't find them," Sal said, after some hesitation. "No DNA prints at all."

"Drones?" Sam asked.

"No, Genies."

Renjou cleared his throat. "Sam?"

"Who's here?" Sal's voice sounded alarmed.

"It's me, Renjou."

"How'd you get in here?" Sal asked.

"I want to talk to Sam," Renjou said. "Sam? Are you here?"

"I'm here," Sam's voice replied. After a brief pause, during which Renjou could hear the two arguing quietly, Saleri's voice came through again:"This is a closed meeting. How'd you get in?"

"How the hell do I know?" replied Renjou. "I must've fallen asleep with the hookup."

After some more quiet, argumentative whispering, Renjou heard Sam's voice say: "It's good to see you, Renjou."

"You can see me?"

"Yes," the voice replied. "Very well, too."

"Then why can't I see you?"

The lights in the room suddenly went dim. Renjou looked around him warily, but nothing happened. Just ahead, he could make out two semi-transparent shapes that moved and glistened with rainbows. They looked just like soap bubbles, except that they were human in shape and size. The two human soap bubbles approached, and Renjou recognized Sam and Saleri. He wanted to put his arms around Sam, but he was transparent and wavering. It seemed that if he so much as touched him, he might burst into nothing.

"Sam," he said. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay, Renjou." Sam walked up to him and put his arm around his shoulder. It felt warm and solid, but Renjou could barely see his face.

"I didn't meant to, Sam, I didn't mean..." He broke off.

"It's all right, Renjou, it's okay."

They stood for a while in silence, while Saleri walked about the room discontentedly somewhere in the grey background. This was a major security breach.

"How did you get here?" Sam asked him."I must've fallen asleep under the hookup."

"No, I mean, how did you get here?"

"I don't know," Renjou replied. "I just got into that box, and then I woke up here in the Stella Maris station. Those damn cops are everywhere now."

"Sal?" Sam called. "Can you bring up anything for us now?"

"I'll try," Sal replied sullenly.

"Listen, Sam, I didn't meant to...I told you, I just fell asleep."

"Not a problem, Renjou," Sam said, and smiled vaguely at him, but the vagueness was due only to his poorly defined simulacrum. "You're trusted."

"Can you tell me what happened?" Renjou asked, and Sam's Bubble Man looked away."For now, we're just trying to find all the people who got here by mistake," he said. "We're doing the search of all the special care units, prisons, hospitals and asylums, but we can't find them."Saleri paused in his pacing and looked over inquisitively at Sam.

"Saleri, what'd you do with Nina's cryopod?" Renjou asked him.

"I didn't take it. I tried to warn you two, you know."

"Then who took it?"

"Those damn D-Dayers. They always sneak up. And somehow, they've also disabled Rosegate."

"I think I can explain that," Renjou said. "I had a problem voider back at Nokida, a real pain in the ass."

"Leon Hessinger?"

"Yeah, he opened it."

"Do you know where he is now?"

Renjou shook his head. "No, why?"

"We might need him. There aren't a lot of good voiders left."

"I dunno," Renjou said. "I don't think we can trust him."

"He might be able to help," Sam said. "But I think we might have a better chance with Lucky. We don't need any more jellyfries. We were trying to bring her here, but instead, we got you." Sam's simulacrum registered a smile. "There was an unexpected error when it loaded - there are a few more people here who don't belong to this time. We should be able to find them all at some point."

"I might've tried a few things back in the day," Renjou said, meditatively stroking his simulacrum's chin, which sported a primitively rendered goatee, "if I'd known this was all on back up." He looked over at Sal. "How many are there?"

"Nine," Sal replied. "Oh..." he stopped suddenly in his tracks. "Five. You, two unidentified profiles, Lucky, and Leon."

"Who's Lucky?"

"She's from another part, most likely sometime around 5090. We don't really know who she is." Sal frowned. "She got here just like all of us, by accident. All I could find is that her name is Alice - or Allison, I'm not really sure which one it is. We talked with her earlier, but she doesn't remember anything. She thinks she's a Genie, so we made things up on the spot and told her that she'd been in a tram accident."

"What do you mean she thinks she's a Genie?" Renjou said. "Is she?"

Saleri's bubble wavered; it seemed to Renjou, a trifle indecisively.

"No," he replied.

"How do you know she's from 5090?"

"It's just a lucky guess, I suppose. She can fly, a little - that won't be available until at least then, even later, possibly. We're tracking her now through First City Metro, but we need to bring her back here. Do you think you can help?"

"You'll have to give me some more information," said Renjou. "And a few spare ID tags."

"Not a problem, Renjou," Sam said.

"Sam, is there any way we could meet outside the... this place?"

"No. I don't know why, but Sal and I can't get out."

"Where are you now?"

"We're...we're nowhere, Renjou. I don't even know how to tell you what it looks like."

"What happened to the Metro?"

"It was destroyed," responded Sal. "Not only the Metro."

"What do you mean?"

"There's nothing left," Sam said. "He's damaged all of our backups, but we're trying to stop it. We've loaded the only full one we have, but it only goes to 4500, after which it stops and resets itself. Something is needed to push it off otherwise it will just keep cycling, in the best case. We're already on the third one, and there aren't many left."

"How many?" Renjou asked.

Sam consulted Saleri's Bubble Man, but Saleri just shrugged.

"Nine," Sam replied. "But they're all fucked up."

"We have about three months now to find the cryounit," Saleri said, and his bubble wavered a little. "After that, we'll go through another full reset, but this one will take place here. We don't have any more complete backups for now, and, as Sam mentioned, the longest one on hand only goes to about 4500. But, if we do this right, things should go back to normal after that."

"And if they don't go back to normal?" inquired Renjou.

Saleri's Bubble Man shrugged again. "In general, I think we can do it."

"If we don't screw anything up," added Sam.

"If we don't screw anything up," confirmed Saleri.

LUCKY

She was sitting by herself inside the small cafe at one of the corner tables, the rest of which were presently unoccupied. She wore a long white summer jacket that fell about her feet to the floor. She had bright red hair that arranged itself on a whim about her shoulders in flame-like tongues. Sometimes, she brushed it back absently over her shoulder. It seemed as if she was waiting for someone, but for as long as Leon watched her, nobody came.

Next to her elbow on the table stood a white plastic coffee cup, against whose side leaned a stiff white paper napkin that bore some sort of slogan or advertisement. As Leon later found out, it threatened to put an end to the Dolls. He used one eye to zoom in when she wasn't looking. The text actually read, "NO-MORE-DOLLS - Help us stamp out prostitution - FCUAAC." The boring acronym stood for "Free City Union Anti-Android Coalition."

A beautiful girl.

He wanted to walk up to her and ask her something random by way of starting a conversation, but he couldn't pluck himself up enough to do it. Nothing came to his mind at all. He went through many possible variations, but the moment he started to get up, all the words left his brain immediately, and he had to sit back down again and collect his thoughts.

He waited. His eyes were emptily fixed now on the big cylindrical artificial fish tank that occupied the center of the café room. Periodically, it glitched, or maybe, its power supply was somehow interrupted, causing its various inhabitants to evolve with unnaturally quick speed into new breeds of aquaria.

Leon watched her for a while, then got up and walked over to her table. He stopped a little distance away, pretending to consult the bulletin of the menu, which was pinned to the wall nearby. He was trying to gather his thoughts, but they were running away from him like mad marbles. He quietly cleared his throat, but couldn't say anything as soon as he remembered what his voice sounded like. His face folded dejectedly, and he was about to walk by on his way to the exit, when the redhead suddenly looked up. There was something very peculiar about her pale green eyes, which made Leon pause for a moment.

"Excuse me," he said. "Do you know where I can find a City Directory?"

"No," the redheaded girl replied. "What are you looking for?"

"Oh, that's all right, never mind," Leon said, and looked toward the exit: a group of vaguely threatening looking young men had gathered in the doorway of the coffee shop. They talked loudly, and swearing seemed to be almost every other word they said. Most of them had a metallic "skooba" ring around their necks, which was the visual ID card of Gang Teken. One of them wore a dark fedora. They looked very young, and, in spite of their fearsome appearance, were most likely just a bunch of local neighborhood kids trying to pass off as gangsters.

"Those bitches are everywhere these days," the redhead said suddenly and not quite directly to Leon.

Leon was startled.

"If you want," the redhead resumed, continuing some train of thought, apparently, "I can help you find whatever you're looking for. I know the city pretty well."

One of the masquerading hoods sent a catcall after them as they exited the shop. He was a scrawny young man with a beautiful but completely profligate face, which accommodated a sparsely growing, curly black goatee.

He lightly tipped his fedora at the girl as they were leaving. "Baby, come back," he said, grinning. Exiting obliquely, the redhead flipped him off.

When they were out on the street, she turned to Leon and said, "My name's Lucky. What's yours?"

Leon considered the situation for a moment. Then it occurred to him that no one really knew him here, anyway, but for some reason, he felt like pulling Lucky's long, awesome leg.

"Bruno," he replied.

Lucky was a bit surprised, but she didn't ask him any more personal questions.

"So, what are you looking for, Bruno?" she asked. She stressed the name slightly as she said it, leading Leon to believe that she didn't fall for his simple trick.

"Well, there's a place I'd heard of, but I'm not sure if it's even here," he said, trying to think of a name, but none came up.

"Well, what's it called?"

"Time Hotel."

"Nope, never heard of it," Lucky said. "So, what do you do?"

"I'm on break right now after detox, and then I'll be sent over to the Orlando," Leon replied.

"So where'd you come from?"

"What do you mean? Oh, you mean which Palisade - Kansas." He was making it up - he had awakened in the Stella Maris station to the sounds of a police beating-in-progress.

"Say, you wanna go to my place?" the redhead suddenly asked.

"What for?" Leon was alarmed.

"What do you think?" inquired the redhead.

Leon thought about it for a good full minute."You know, if you aren't careful, you could get into a lot of trouble, Lucky," he said, eyeing her.

Lucky gave an abrupt, high-pitched, vampirical guffaw-laugh that caused a few passersby to turn their heads in their direction.

"Oh my God!" she cried. "You sounded just like my mother!" She laughed, rolling her eyes. Leon was beginning to have his doubts. "I was just kidding!" she said, flipping a lock of red away from her eyes.

"And if I had said yes?"

Lucky's slightly elongated, exquisite face suddenly adopted a mock-serious expression. She reminded him a little of Nina, just the way her face was a bit long, and the way she looked at him, although her eyes were a pale green that sometimes seemed to border on light orange or yellow. She took out a pair of magenta-tinted aviator sunglasses from her coat pocket and sent Leon one last parting look. Then she pulled them on, and her eyes became a bit harder to gage.

"If you had said yes, I would have ditched you right here on this street corner," she said, but in a light way that did not determine anything. Her shades had turned nearly opaque under the reddish late afternoon sun, and her eyes were almost invisible. She looked up at the tall, transparent hub that rose at the center of the city's downtown district. It was a deep blue-violet, blinking constantly with various lights. The districts were arranged circularly, and they were currently viewing the mighty hub from Sector 7.

She looked back at Leon, and said, "Now, I'm guessing you haven't been to the top yet. Have you?"

"No. What's up there?"

"Come on, I'll show you. It's quite a trip," she said, and took him by the arm.

FIRST CITY METRO

They found a cab, which took them into the heart of the city. At its very center was a giant, multiple-branched escalator hub. Leon hadn't yet seen the downtown, or much of anything, in fact, all the time he was living in First City Metro, not counting the three months he'd spent in detox.

He had never before seen an escalator system of that size. It began on the first floor tier inside its protective cylindrical hub, which marked the physical center of First City Metro. From there, its transparent tubes branched out in all directions, some going up, and some horizontally, and some in a circle. This was the heart of the city, and the moving ramps its veins and arteries. Thousands of people came and went, going in circles and up and down, like some kind of miniature toys caught up inside a giant, well-structured interior of a vacuum machine. Floating on standby, colorful, shiny, and somehow oddly bug-like small taxi hovers waited patiently at each glass-covered pick-up station and reinforced junction port. The transparently encased arms of the escalator glittered with thousands of moving magneto-steps, glistening, octopus-like as they rose. Eight of them went to the very top of the hub tower, where they eventually became lost among the diminishing, rising rings of the uppermost tiers, which gleamed with star-like lights.

They took one of the enormous, slow-moving escalator arms to the top ring of the tower, watching the city shrink into a miniature of itself below their feet.

"How do you like it?" Lucky cried, excitedly pulling on his sleeve.

"How soon will we get there at this speed?" inquired Leon. He did not mean it any bad way - he was just mentally calculating the possible height vs. the maximum speed.

"You're a real party poop, Bruno, you know that?"

"I'm sorry," Leon said, "I didn't mean to..." He trailed off, because the escalator suddenly sped up. "What the hell was that?" he cried, terrified, clinging unconsciously to Lucky's arm. She was laughing her red head off.

"How does it work?" he asked.

She opened her bright red mouth to speak, but suddenly shut it again. She decided it was better to let him concentrate.

They watched the hub disappear from the center of the city as it shrank into a tiny, tiny miniature below their feet.

A good twenty minutes later, they stepped out of the escalator tube onto a platform where a pink-and-blue elevator was waiting. It was decorated childishly with glittering stars. They walked up the short stairway that connected the platform to the elevator. The star-covered cabin slowly carried them past several tall, arching windows, through which they could see some enormous landing platforms, which floated lazily in the golden shadows of the sky. They were designed for all types of aircraft. The airships, all of different brands, makes, sizes and colors, sat resting on the round landing pads like bugs on their favorite leaf. The enormous landing pads slowly drifted past them in the cheerful, endless blue sky, their gently sloping surfaces colorfully tattooed with rings of various landing zone insignia.

The next smaller, faster service elevator took them to the highest point of the dome's roof, and they walked out of its decorated doors onto the pale-pink, round surface of a small viewing platform - one of many that grew like tree mushrooms off the sides of the great dome. The edges of the platform were guarded by a beautifully decorated, carved balcony made of artificial porous sandstone, whose pinkish balustrades ran amok with seahorses and shells and intricately molded flowers and stars.

Above them, the sky was blue and covered with slowly curling, drifting white clouds. The artificial sun shone down upon the great ocean sparkling below, which lapped like a giant silver wing just below the railing of the balcony. Seagulls cruised idly overhead, occasionally screeching unpleasantly when they spotted aerial passersby.This was the simulation. Lucky was intently watching his face.

"Wanna see something amazing?" she said.

"Such as?"

"Close your eyes."

She pulled on a switch in the entrance panel, a courtesy display plaque above which read, "Please leave simulation running." Suddenly, the sky became black, and Leon could see the glass covered view of the real sky above the dome. It was also covered with clouds, but they were heavy, almost solid, and dark violet.

Lucky did not take her eyes off his face now. Leon peered over the railing: there was nothing below. Just a grey, endless-looking wasteland. Thin ant-like tracks radiated from the base of the dome. On a microscopic scale, Leon could see some Mop machines tilling the ground, going in perpetual circles - they were digging up the encrusted upper layer of the radon-contaminated ground and carrying it off to be decontaminated. Their silvery, thin power cables radiated from the central magnet like cords from a swinging merry-go-round. Smaller shiny, green haulers called

Locusts took the rubble away in small batches to be detoxed back at the hub.

He stood for a while with both hands on the railing, until Lucky called him.

"Listen, I'm sorry," she said, taking off her shades and folding them down into her pocket.

Leon looked at her. "Is that...everything?"

"No, no, of course not," Lucky said, putting one hand on his sleeve. "That's only the Metro. All the other Palisades got out of it just fine," she said, then added, "more or less," almost as an afterthought. She turned on the previous simulation, and the heavy silver tug of the ocean began lapping again below their feet.

When they had left the platform, leaving the simulation running, Lucky turned to Leon, and said: "Let's go see where the sun goes."

Leon looked up at the sky: the sun was in its late afternoon position, its bright disc emitting a natural enough, if somewhat reddish light. It did not occur to him that the sun went anywhere at all. "Where does it go?" he asked her."People say it sets somewhere beyond the West Hills, but I've never been there myself. Wanna go? I know a good place that rents out cheap hovers."

They rented an old, rattling hover that was constantly making noises as if it were suffocating, and Lucky drove them out of the Metro's downtown hub. They passed the last smoky rings of the city's outskirts and continued into the rolling green hills of the pastures, where state of the art processing facilities were stealthily camouflaging themselves as red wooden barns. All the while, they were keeping their eyes on the bright disc of the sun as it was setting into its low arc across the late sky.

Just ahead, grey streaks began to show up jarringly in the hazy pink distance, like rough edged tears through pretty paper. All the colors were becoming somewhat desaturated here: they were entering the occlusion zone, which kept the exact size and shape of the sun and other elements of the sky purposely distorted to look more realistic from a distance. They passed through the grey mirage-like layer, and then through the feeble, flickering "No Trespassing" sign. Its face had been desecrated by a loose sprawl of graffiti, and the big, crudely painted letters read: "End of the World. Fuck the Dolls."In a good twenty minutes, they finally began to approach the wall of the dome. The wall cropped up, finally freed from all the deceptions of the shielding occlusion layers, and rose right in front of them suddenly out of the lingering remnants of grey mist. Lucky hit the brakes, and the hover squealed and signaled its displeasure by displaying a loss of control warning panel. It grunted unhappily when it stopped, rocking gently on its brake discs.

They stepped out of the hover. The lower parts of the wall were covered with neon bright graffiti, which had also been sprayed onto the faces of the lower lying stars. An extensive procession of arabesques on one of the stars spelled out: "SinBig-Katz."

The bright disc of the sun was sinking slowly into the ground like a gigantic coin lowering into a slot. The reddish, fading light wobbled unsteadily all around them. As soon as the sun disc sank into its black slot, the stars began to appear, one by one. They were not really stars, of course, just lamps; many of them were named after legally registered inhabitants of First City Metro. Most of them on the lower parts of the wall had been defaced or broken, and some had been completely knocked out; the dead stars lay like transparent tombstones at their feet.

Lucky tapped one of the fallen stars, and it lit up convulsively into flamingo pink.

NAMES

People were much less scrupulous after the war. Although Leon's original ID could not be traced, he was soon issued a new one and put to work cleaning the toxic buildup in the Orlando, along with thousands of other drones and Dolls. The Orlando was a high priority Palisade, as not much of it had been damaged in the Great War: only a few districts stood in ruins, while the rest of it was still relatively clean. The biggest concern at this time was the radiation.

It felt good to see the real sky above a real city after three months of being bottled up inside the Metrodome, whose two main domes were frequently defiled \- mostly, in spirit - by kids who usually referred to them as "dekapai". While in detox, Leon never revealed that he was a Genie. It was fortunate, as Genies were still illegal here, although, as Leon later remembered, the Genie Rights Movement would take off soon after the war, as more and more people demanded their right to a new body. It would have an especially big following among the veterans of the First Great War, many of whom had no chance of making a full recovery otherwise.

Along with hundreds of other drones, Leon piloted comparatively small, hand operated debris haulers called Locusts, cleaned the interiors and exteriors of various buildings and houses, and drove the rough rolling Mop machines that soaked up toxic waste and radiation off the city streets. The workers wore special suits at all times to protect them, which simultaneously absorbed the remaining radiation and toxins: their suits were covered with many small, colorful gumball-like spheres. They were filled with some kind of sticky liquid that soaked up the radiation, and were taken off the suits and emptied every day before being newly refilled.They were told to report if they found any more bodies, but there were almost none in the well-preserved Orlando, parts of which looked just the way they had before the war. The results of the multiple-pronged efforts of the cleanup operation were collected into enormous canisters and sent on a one-way trip to the neighboring, long-dead planet of Galaxa, or dumped into one of the endless, seemingly bottomless craters on the Moon.

At the end of the month, Leon was dispatched back to the Metrodome. He did not expect to be called back so early, and even the agent who signed him off said it was an unusually early release date. The agent and a few authorities scanned dutifully through his records, but all of the official stamps, signatures, and other formalities were unarguably in place.Leon did not know it, of course, but he owed his quick return to First City Metro entirely to Lucky. She called him the next day right after he got back.

She was sitting in his lap. Leon did not quite recollect how, or when, she got there. On her left thigh, he noticed a small, dark maroon tattoo. It was shaped somewhat like a heart, but the more he looked at it, the less it looked like a heart, but rather some sort of concealed ID number or tag. He didn't have time to find out what it read, because she pulled her arms around him, and her fiery red hair fell all about his face, forming a protective, shimmering curtain around them. Leon did not move while she kissed him.

"Don't you like me?" she asked, leaning back slightly.

"I...it's not that, Lucky. I like you, very much... but..." Leon did not have a chance to finish, as Lucky immediately sealed his mouth with her lips.

Blindly, with one hand, she began to search for Leon, but suddenly pulled back. Leon's face flushed a bright red, almost matching Lucky's hair in color.

"I thought you were a drone!" she said, with rounded eyes.

"Really? Why?"

"Well...you told me your name was Bruno, so naturally I assumed..."

"That's not my real name," he said.

Lucky looked up and focused her lie detectors. She looked very pretty that way, with those eyes and the bright red-orange hair, and Leon couldn't help but stare deep into the pale green discs that were still registering her surprise. The girl was beautiful, from her head down to her toes. Lucky curled and uncurled her right foot, then brushed it back and forth against the imitation-wooden floor. She cocked her head sideways at Leon like a curious magpie eyeing an unsuspecting changeling in its nest. Her face became still for a moment, adopting a strange, closed smile. Leon looked away, pretending to study the fake parquet tiles, but in reality, he was just watching her ankle. Even though she was still in his lap, Leon could feel her pulling away, very subtly. She seemed to be approaching some kind of breaking point. Leon understood that, and let it slide.

"Then what's your real name?" she asked him.

"Leon."

Lucky got off his lap. "Why are you lying to me? I don't even know you yet, and you're already lying! All the time! First it's Bruno, then it's Leon, then Lemon. You're a flake."

"What's your name?" Leon suddenly asked, and Lucky's amazing face looked at him with a very zany, testing expression.

"Lucky," she replied.

"That's not a real name."

"Yes it is. Just like Bruno, and Michael, and Leon..."

Lucky began dressing up, angrily jerking on her long black stockings to get them back up on her slender, long legs. She had an incredible body, not too big, not too small, but just about right. He contemplated what it would be like, also wondering what her age was - he wouldn't dare to ask, of course, considering, but he estimated her to be about twenty-two to twenty-five.

"This shit happens all the time!" Lucky was talking largely to herself now. "Every time I meet someone, this shit always begins." She had already pulled on her black shimmering miniskirt and was adjusting it in the mirror to make sure it hadn't hiked up \- too much, anyway. Leon decided to chance it.

"Wait," Leon calmly said. "This is all just a misunderstanding."

"You bet!" Lucky said, and picked up her coat. She turned to leave. With chagrin, Leon remembered that his subsidized housing unit, designed exclusively for drones and Dolls, had no bathroom. It was a long trip.

"Lucky, I lied to you, but there's a reason for it. I don't know anyone I can trust with this, in fact," he said, not taking his eyes off her. Lucky paused on her stormy way out, and eyed him more carefully.

"So what's the reason?" she asked.

"I'll tell you."

"Well?"

"But only if you tell me what your real name is."

Lucky groaned. She threw her coat down on the floor and returned to the recliner. "I told you, that is my real name," she said, and her bright hair seemed to float up a bit around her, halo-like. It also seemed to Leon that it had subtly changed colors. The change was very, very slight, but the color had definitely gone from a bright flame to a slightly darker, more desaturated red.

"Do you believe me now?" she asked him.

"Sure, why not."

"Then why'd you lie to me? Twice, already," she added stubbornly, still playing the interrogator.

"I was going to tell you, but..." Leon did not get to finish the first sentence.

"No!" Lucky abruptly cried, covering his mouth with both her hands, which suddenly formed a soft barricade. "Don't tell me anything at all."

"Why?" Leon's muffled voice inquired from beneath the hand barricade.

"That keeps things more interesting."

"I'd like to..."

"Shut up."

She kissed him again several times, running her mouth along the side of his face and neckline, after which she turned her attention to his nipples. Leon's head was about to explode. "But we've got to get you fixed up!" she said, pulling away a little. "Would you like a...little tune-up?"

He was feeling rather uncomfortable discussing these things with Lucky, but she seemed to be completely at ease about it.

"I don't know," he replied. "What do they have?"

"Well, all kinds of things. They can change your face, your hands, the size of your...you know, give you a whole new body, if you wanted it."

"Isn't that illegal?" Leon asked.

"Nobody has to know, right?" Lucky quickly ran her fingers along his mouth, as if zipping it.

"And...how much is that going to cost?"

"It depends on where you go. I know a good place; it's pretty cheap, actually. I've never been there, but my friend has. She turned out just fine."Leon recalled their earlier trip on the rundown hover. "I don't know if that's a good idea," he said. "I mean, I'd like to but..."

Lucky giggled.

"I was just kidding, Leon. I'm sorry," she said, shaking her head. "As long as you don't change your ID tag, nobody really cares if you get new mods or parts - as long as you don't rip them right off a drone or something."

DR. JURGEN

They were standing in a small, dimly lit shop. The operator of the shop, named Dr. Jurgen, was eyeing them with some curiosity from behind the counter. They went through the multiple selection screens for all kinds of parts; some were colorful, gaudy, and tasteless. Some were boringly standard in shape and size. The more expensive ones looked suspect, as they clearly had rubbed out registration marks. Dr. Jurgen did not take his beady, wetly glistening eyes off Lucky for an instant. A few times, Leon saw him lick his thin lips with a long, dark, and dirty tongue, squinting at her with one eye. He wanted to cover her from this vision, and tried to stand between Lucky and the one-eyed doctor as often as he could.

Leon hesitated.Quiet music was playing dully inside the shop: the melody was a bit hard to recognize, but overall it sounded like an Electromix of "O du lieber RinTinTin," the latest hit single by WeezlePop, a band that almost exclusively produced E-Retro-Jazz. The zany music was playing on infinite loop, and it seemed to Leon that to spend even ten minutes here listening to this soundtrack could drive someone nuts, unless they were completely deaf.

He glanced over at Lucky, and then at Dr. Jurgen: the old doctor was busily digging in a bin of various prickly-looking metallic, plastic, and hybrid parts that most people would call trash - or recyclables, if they felt like being polite.

Dr. Jurgen was clearly not deaf, and the more Leon watched his sharp, jerky movements around the trash bin, the more he found himself uncomfortably settling on his second conclusion.

They went into the private selection booth, which resembled a miniature red circus tent on the outside. The plastic switch on its entrance panel displayed "Occupied," even though it was empty.

"What about that one?" Lucky asked, once they were safely inside. She pointed at the screen, which crawled with a variety of parts, most of them private.

"What? That? That's just...ridiculous. No!"

"Which suit would you like?" There was a dark one and a light silver metallic. They were both called Nelcro. "This one looks good," she added.

"I don't really care," he replied. "Which side is it on?"

"What do you mean? It's on the left. Are you all right, Leon?"

"Yeah, I think my vision's just flipped around, that's all," he said. "I'll take the white one."

They emerged from the booth a few minutes later and were greeted by Dr. Jurgen, who showed them their selections in all their possible dimensions on the monitor's already long screen.

"How much is that one?" Lucky asked him, pointing at a flickering blue shape. Dr. Jurgen looked closely at the screen, and then dove into Lucky's green eyes. Something was very off about this doctor, she thought, and blinked her eyes quickly several times, as if hoping it would clean them.

He pulled open the parts in diagrammatical full view, and it suddenly occurred to Leon that some of these things did not belong in Dr. Jurgen's shop - or the year 4499.

"Fifty NKU, a good price," said the doctor. "A good deal for future stuff," he added, and winked at them humorously with his beady black eye.

"Just relax now," said Dr. Jurgen, and began prying open the protective panels on his neck and upper arms. Leon deliberated for a long time before letting Dr. Jurgen dismantle him, as he was not sure if the new parts would be any good, but he finally agreed. It was Lucky's idea to give him some extra shape as well as muscle - but that was all they could afford. Dr. Jurgen happily took off the well-made bust plate in exchange for a little discount.

"Say something," requested Dr. Jurgen, tuning Leon's voice box with one hand.

"What do you mean?" Leon asked, and immediately fell silent, as the current voice setting made him sound like a cartoon rat.

Dr. Jurgen guffawed loudly. "Oops, wrong one," he said, and tuned the dial in the opposite direction with a screwdriver. He poked around some more, rotating the dial at the center. "Now say something," he invited.

"Testing, testing," responded Leon. The voice sounded a bit low and jarring, but Dr. Jurgen soon tuned that to a more or less appropriate degree.

"Good," said the doctor. "Just one other thing...I don't work with Genies, you understand, ja?"

"I understand," Leon replied.

"Good, then let's go to the operating room. Madam will wait here then."

"I don't mean to pry your brain, but... you're not a Genie by any chance, are you?" Dr. Jurgen asked him, once they were alone in the small operating room. It was lit up brightly by a single halo lamp and was rather dingy. Leon was sitting on the operating table, loosely dangling his legs off its edge, while Dr. Jurgen prepared an anesthetic that would drown out any accidental damage to his arm muscles and other wiring.

"Because, you know," pursued the doctor, "sometimes I get people here and they start to complain once I start, so just to be sure...Are you?"

"No," Leon said. "Why do you ask?"

"No reason," replied Dr. Jurgen, methodically disconnecting the wiring in his upper arm. "Sometimes, it's better this way, in fact, but it always interests me, on a deeply personal level: why live with a synthon?"

Leon had a feeling that he should not pursue it any further, but he asked him anyway.

"What do you mean?" he said quietly.

"Never mind, like I said, it's better this way. There are many pretty girls," Dr. Jurgen said with a strange smile. "I have one too."

The slender feminine arm came off its retainers with a distinctive snap and Leon emptily wiggled the roots of his shoulder muscles, which caused a dense, black fluid to drip slimily to the floor.

"Stop doing that," Dr. Jurgen requested in a professionally concerned manner. "It can damage the muscles," he added. "And the floor."

Dr. Jurgen used surprisingly large doses of local anesthetic, and Leon was partially numb for several days.

* * * *

Later that afternoon, three strange people entered Dr. Jurgen's shop. They wore long, monkish robes and dark hoods that covered their faces. Dr. Jurgen noted with dread that under the hoods, they wore classic robber balaclavas. They stopped right in front of the counter and bowed politely to Dr. Jurgen whose eyes peeled open. His shop had never before seen bandits of that rank and size. He was about to raise his hands when the figure in the middle spoke up.

"Good day," said the figure, tipping off an odd greeting. He placed both of his hands proprietarily on the counter. Dr. Jurgen's sharp eyes immediately noticed that his thin, spider-veined left hand was covered with some kind of elaborate insignia or marks. They were colorful, unfittingly cheerful designs that looked as if they were made of multi-colored spun glass. The stranger noticed Dr. Jurgen's attentive look and quickly pulled his hand off the counter, folding it behind his back.

"We have heard a lot about you, Dr. Jurgen," he said with a thin, slippery smile.

Dr. Jurgen couldn't quite find what to say in response, and stared mutely at the three goons for a full minute. He was hoping that this was just a bad dream. A very bad dream, indeed. Inside the pocket of his white doctor's uniform, Dr. Jurgen's sweaty hand was massaging a small personal Deko gun.They looked at him as if evaluating him, and whispered quietly among themselves. Then the one with the decorated hand spoke up again:

"We have a need for your services, Herr Doctor."

"Ja? Yes? What can I do for you?" inquired the old doctor, forgetting to put on a professional smile.

The man pulled back his hood, revealing a skeletally thin face and a pointy, bald head mottled with dark grey spots, like some bizarre rock that had been overtaken by lichen. He kept smiling at Dr. Jurgen, who nervously smiled back.

"We have a very special request for you."

MAGIC

When he was ready, Lucky emerged from the adjacent room, carefully arranging her hair. She changed its color repeatedly, going from red to green, to pink and lemon yellow, and then black and neon blue with wavy magenta ribbons. The late pink afternoon light came through the window blinds and cast the room in bright zebra stripes. In a few seconds, her hair turned pale gold. She looked like a snow princess. Leon shuddered - for some reason it suddenly became very cold.

"Which one do you like, Leon?" she asked him, moving through the long shafts of light. She paused on canary yellow.

"Black," he said, and Lucky's hair instantly changed color. The black hair gave her an even more peculiar resemblance to Nina. Although it was not his favorite color, Leon had an almost perverse desire to see Lucky this way. He didn't quite know why.

"What's your real name?" he asked.

"Lucky," she replied, with lingering irritation. "That's my real name." She shook her head, switching her hair back to its original color.There was something evasive about her answer, but Leon decided not to press the question.

"Hey, wanna see something?" she said.

"Such as?"

Lucky began to rise unsupported to the ceiling above the bed, her flame like hair fanned out all around her. She opened her arms, moving them as if she were making a snow angel in the air.Leon stood up. "How do you do that?" he asked.

"It's magic," replied the beautiful apparition.

"Well, I guess anything's possible," Leon said, pulling gently on Lucky's suspended ankle, which caused her to bob up and down a bit.

"You're being silly, Leon," Lucky observed from her domain. "I thought you had a very logical mind."

"Me? I'm not logical at all. But I've never seen anything like it."

"It's a lot of fun. At first, it's really strange, but somehow it also feels...natural."

"I suppose it could be better than taking a cab," he said, smiling.

Lucky floated down to the bed and alighted. "I really don't have much use for it here, though."

"Why?"

"Are you kidding me? They'll wrap you up in about a minute and a half if they learn you're from the future." Lucky rounded her eyes as she said that, which gave her an even crazier expression. "Here, let me show you."

She held out her arm, flipping open several small exterior panels: inside them, after Leon had somewhat recovered from his surprise, he could see organic-looking things that resembled tear ducts. They were still emitting a sea-green electrical current that went round and round the inner layers of her forearm.

"See?" she said. "That's not magic at all, is it now?"

"That's a nice mod.

Lucky was surprised. "It's not a mod," she said, and looked at him more carefully.

"What do you mean?" Leon's voice dipped strangely.

"I'm a Genie, Leon," Lucky said, smiling.She pulled her arms around him and tried to lift him up. They rose for a moment to the ceiling, then tumbled back down onto the bed.

KINDERSPIEL

After a few months spent in detox, Mike and EZ were to be sent, just like hundreds of other Dolls and drones, to help with the cleanup. They had other ideas, however, and as soon as they were out on their two week break, they found their way to all the right parts of town and immediately swiped their real ID's for fakes. To get things started, they first went around the bars on the outskirts of City Metro's downtown.

After several small-scale jobs, and drinks, half of which were only paid out in half, Mike and EZ decided it was time for an upgrade if anyone was going to take them seriously. They'd heard of a small parts shop that was run by someone named Dr. Jurgen. They had long forgotten about the crooked Department inspector, Jurgen Biengoulalulu, whose name they had never learned to pronounce or remember anyway. When they saw him through the shop's sun-screen covered window, they were struck by an odd feeling of familiarity. They did not realize, however, that this was not a complete coincidence.

Dr. Jurgen was busy behind the counter. He was adjusting the shoulder motors on an old, scratched-up looking drone or Doll arm that seemed to have belonged to someone who was either not very big, or not very obsessive about displaying the size of their muscles, or, at the very least, just faking it.

"Umm...Dr. Jurgen?" EZ said, peering behind the counter.

"Agh! You again?" Dr. Jurgen exclaimed, letting go of the artificial arm. It fell to the floor with a heavy thud and rolled under the counter.

"Well, we seem to keep running into each other," EZ noted sarcastically.

"What do you want? I didn't do anything! You can't report me! We had a deal, an agreement! Das ist doch ein Kinderspiel, ja!" Dr. Jurgen rattled off rapidly. "I will report you!"

"Take it easy, Doc," Mike said calmly. "We just need a few extra parts."

"Oh! Well, that's a relief!" Dr. Jurgen laughed nervously, and clapped his hands together. He jerked on the yellow collar of his medic's turtleneck as if it were suffocating him like a small boa. "Well, gentlemen, what do you want? I have many, many toys in here."

"Say, are you two fine gentledrones in need of some work?" the old doctor asked, once they were complete with numerous new extras, most of which came free of charge. Dr. Jurgen took no chances.

"You could say that," replied EZ."You see, the other day I met this wonderful girl, but I forgot her name and number. Ja?" Dr. Jurgen stood up from the glistening desk and gave it a few professional, circular wipes with a dirty towel.

"Such a beauty too, with bright red hair, like the flames, ja?"

"How much?" Mike asked him.

"I am a poor and humble man," replied Dr. Jurgen. "Twelve hundred NKU is all I can offer."

Mike and EZ got up. "Good day to you, Doc," Mike said. "Thanks for the parts."

"Wait! Eight thousand?"

Mike and EZ sat down.

"He's a repo," EZ said, after they'd left the shop.

"So what? So are we now," Mike answered. He had been outfitted with an excellent new eye set: in fact, he observed to himself, squinting pleasurably, his vision here was far better than the one he had in the future, which was gradually erasing itself from his memory. There were not a lot of things he missed, especially cops with the latest make of Deko guns that were capable of taking out an entire building.

"You think it might be a bit tricky to go after her just like that?" EZ held up his hand, which showed a partially burned out, loosely fitting monitor. He had it accidentally broken by a dumb lab assistant while he was in detox.

"Nah," Mike said, lighting another cigarette.

"We're not even sure if she's a Doll yet." He exhaled the smoke and looked through it.

"And if she turns out to be a Doll?" EZ said worriedly. "He said she's not from around here, to watch out."

"Are you going to chicken out of it now, or what?"

"No," EZ replied. "But I don't like it. I don't feel like getting my ass kicked. She's not a regular build, from what it sounds."

OAKLEY'S BAR

Oakley ran a bar that bore his name right next door to an illicit strip club called Sammara. This joint establishment was located at the intersection of Poll and Post streets on the outer reaches of City Metro's downtown. While this particular area was far less attractive and safe than the inner sanctum of the downtown district, the rent here was considerably cheaper, as were the prices on many other things.

When Mike and EZ stepped through the door of Oakley's, a turret suddenly sprang out of the ceiling panel like an angry jack-in-the-box cobra, shining its red laser beams right into their eyes. Mike and EZ sprang back on reflex, and EZ nearly tumbled over a broken bar stool, which, for some reason, had found its final resting place right in the middle of the entrance.

They could hear old Oakley's creaky, salacious laughter from inside the murky depths of the joint. "Gets 'em every time! Gets 'em every time!" cried the old drone, waving his many arms at them from behind the bar counter.Oakley was an older model and his pranks were often repetitive in nature, but they, nevertheless, did work every time. Glowering, Mike and EZ stepped inside the parlor. The place reeked familiarly of old machine oil and dirty grease.

"Gets 'em every time! Gets 'em every time!" the old drone cackled, squinting at them through his orange goggled eyes. "Ha! Ha ha ha! What'll it be tonight?" he asked them, folding a new towel neatly on the dirty, oil stained counter.

"A Greasy Martini," Mike responded.

"Hey, it was only a joke, understand?"

"Very funny," noted EZ. "Next time, I'll shove that turret..."

"Hey, hey, no need to be like that," Oakley said, grinning metallically. "But you gotta admit, I got you! Every time! Every time! Ha hahaha!"

"That's enough, Oaks," EZ said. He had a strong urge to disable Oakley permanently now, but restrained it. The old drone's thin, rattling voice was giving him a headache. The pain rambled randomly through his head, going about as it pleased and upsetting the different parts of his nervous system.Oakley monkeyed up to the back of the bar on his two lower arm-legs and began preparing a Greasy Martini: the name was a play on the true nature of Oakley's Bar, which was usually full of all sorts of mechanical grease. Oakley shook the mixer with a rubbery, waving motion of his long, hose-like arms. All in all, Oakley had six of them, four of which he used for dispensing beer, sodas, and other services to the bar patrons, sometimes at the same time. His two other arms were used primarily for locomotion, as he had no lower appendages that could be conventionally classified as feet.

"How are the girls?" Mike asked him, looking around: the smoky entrance to the Sammara nightclub glittered provocatively with pink neon lights. The double M's in its name were formed by four pairs of female legs in black stilettos. "Well, as you can see, things are a bit slow this evening," responded Oakley, and mournfully spun around.

"Can you believe it? They broke all my chairs last night," he said, pointing at a few specimens that were still usable. "Outrageous, don't you think?" He peered into Mike's eyes, obviously looking for sympathy. Mike nodded, and his face momentarily adopted a more fitting expression.Oakley's Bar adjoined the Sammara strip club, and a secret underground tunnel that ran through the basement floor connected the two establishments. In case of a surprise police visit, the strippers fled to the bar, and the bar patrons into the strip club via this passageway, making it very confusing in legal terms as to who, when, and, most importantly, where to arrest. The tunnel was Oakley's idea, and so far, it had worked quite well, as local regulations prohibited the arrest or harassment of anyone who had just entered a nightclub, bar, or strip joint. It was a legal formality instituted by the city's first mayor, Maggie O'Reilley Chen, who, prior to becoming a mayor, was a notoriously active gambler and an avid drinker. That was in the long-forgotten days before the protective dome covered the First City, because there were no weapons yet big enough to harm it - too much. Back then, the First City was a rather wild place, even by modern standards, but the citizens fondly recalled and honored their first mayor when it came to this particular legality.

EZ's face had grown long from sitting inside the bar, as well as the persistent headache, which knocked about more dully after the drink. He was sipping it absently, even though he was not really enjoying it. Something about Oakley, his bar, or maybe, them both, was causing him a lot of pain, especially in his right temple. When Oakley turned his back to prepare the drinks, EZ secretly scanned the room with his trackers, but found nothing out of the ordinary. He tiredly rubbed the side of his head with his hand.

Oakley's crude mouth flipped upside down and adopted a sad expression to match EZ's, after which Oakley placed both of his upper hands symmetrically on the counter in front of him. He leaned closer to EZ, extending his long, ringed, rubbery neck. At the same time, his head, which resembled an old, heavily dented tin can, flipped upside down, and he placed it neatly on the counter between his hands. That way, Oakley's face looked more like some kind of monstrously grinning beer mug.

"Any special orders tonight?" he asked, flipping his mouth loosely up and down.

"Yeah, I guess so," responded EZ. He clicked open his monitor and showed him Lucky's ID. "Know where she lives?"

Oakley tried to rotate his head to view the picture, but it was stuck in place. EZ helped him by rotating the image on the monitor instead. The metallic, corroded rings of Oakley's ancient eye expanded and contracted creakily as he scanned it. Something fell inside the tin can of his head.

"Yes," he said, at last. "Between West Park Avenue and Mason."

"What about the apartment number?" Mike asked.

"Umm...I have a hard time with numbers." Oakley was slowly unscrewing his head from its upside down position on the counter, but it was resisting his efforts.

"All right, how much?"

"Five NKU," Oakley replied. "Pretty, pretty please," he added vulgarly.

"All right," Mike said, and placed three NKU chips on the stained bar counter.Oakley gave him a critical look. "That's only three!"

"I thought you had a hard time with numbers."

Oakley plaintively put his black, rubber-coated hands around his head. At the same time, he managed to move his primitive mouth into a grieving expression, which would actually be a smile if his head were in the right place. Oakley was very limited in terms of his hardware, but he made up plenty for that.

"All right, all right," Mike said. "I'm touched." He delivered the rest of the chips onto the surface of the bar counter. Like an expert player, Oakley instantly scooped them up and tossed them inside his gaping, rust-filled mouth, which opened wider than a black hole.

"L-758," he said, beaming from ear to ear and grinding the chips. "Name of the complex is Ten51."

TEN51

"All right, Ten51 it is," Mike said, as he and EZ stepped up to the security gate.

"Your ID, please," a gruff voice requested mechanically from the securely shut wall panel.Mike and EZ exchanged a brief look.

"Your ID, please," repeated the mechanical voice drearily. It seemed to belong to, apparently, a lady. After a short, expectant pause, the voice reawakened: "If you don't have an ID, please choose from the following menu items: to call a tenant, press 7; to schedule an appointment, press 9. To report an emergency, press 11. To report a crime or fire, dial 911. Otherwise, leave the area immediately. You have one minute and thirty-three seconds."

EZ attempted to zap the lock, but the security panel, which housed the creaky voice suddenly slid open, revealing a turret and a simple, old model grayscale camera: the counter on the turret was doing a very distinct countdown and the number had already somehow reached seven. Mike and EZ exchanged another look, and backed away from the dark waiting mouth.

As soon as they left the turret-dominated area, the security gate opened and an odd-looking pair emerged. Mike and EZ watched them from the street corner. There was a tall, red-haired girl in a white summer jacket, black shimmering mini skirt, and green high heels. With her was a strange drone with pale red hair and a slight body build. The drone wore a long, dark jacket, and it was difficult to tell how well he was outfitted underneath."That's the one," EZ's voice said inaudibly in Mike's head.

They followed the strange pair down the street. There was something about the drone that gave Mike the willies.

That day, there was a parade going on in Tarmagant Square, and crowds of people cheerfully filled the inner city streets. The drone and the redhead were now walking down Main Street, but there were so many people here among the different parade floats that forward movement was nearly impossible. Several times, Mike lost track of EZ as well as the girl.

Mike could barely concentrate here: a double wall of noise surrounded him. There were too many thoughts inside his head, and he could hear only snippets, while the rest was a rippling, gyrating wave of static that buzzed like a beehive inside his skull. EZ was now trailing somewhere far behind him, as they had been separated earlier by a stream of smaller floats that tailgated the centerpiece of the parade - a giant, triple decked cake decorated with colorful flying streamers. On the very top of the cake stood a life sized set of Doll figures that waved their arms, from which flew various advertisements disguised as colorful confetti ribbons. The leaflets had small flapping wings and slowly settled over the crowd like flocks of transparent, annoying insects, dragging their ribbons behind them through the streets.

By now, Mike could no longer see the redhead. He was beginning to get worried, when he suddenly spotted the bright red shock again. He wondered what would happen once they caught her and brought her back to Jurgen. It also occurred to him that if she turned out to be a real girl, or even just a Genie, things could get very complicated. Mike hesitated, even as he followed the odd pair. EZ was still a little ways behind him, but at times, he could hear his interrupted voice inside his head - this way, they could at least keep some sort of track.

* * * *

To avoid the colorful stampede of the float parade, Lucky and Leon turned off Main Street into a nearby alley.

Unlike the dirty, archaic alleys of the outer Metro, this one was very clean and well taken care of. Even the trash chute lids here were a rosy pink, and they numbered several dozen on each side of the alley. The chutes' dank, hollow tubes fed into the underground main stem, which emptied out automatically seven times a day. The red brick walls of the buildings were covered with a dense latticework of flowers, and various potted plants hung suspended from cables in their decorated pots just below the balconies and windows. It was the prettiest downtown back alley Leon and Lucky had ever seen.It was a long alley as well, and curved slightly along its length in the middle, which prevented them from seeing the taxi hover parked just ahead. It seemed like a regular cab, but it was blocking the exit.

As they were turning the curve, Leon spotted the hover and immediately pulled Lucky back. "Come on," he said.

"Don't be so paranoid, Leon, it's just a taxi!"

"I don't like it." Leon was trying to zoom in on the taxi's windshield, but it was turned off and opaquely blank. "We'll find some other way there," he said, and they reluctantly turned back. They walked a bit further down the alley, passing its curving midsection, and then stopped in their tracks: just ahead of them, a figure was approaching.

The thug neared them carefully. A dark executioner-style hood was covering his face, but Leon could tell right away that he was a drone. He was a heavy type of build and had almost disproportionately big, towering shoulders that dwarfed his rather small head. In his hand, he carried a police or military style zapper gun. He approached, pointing the zapper at them, but mostly, at Lucky.

"What do you want?" Lucky asked him.

"Keep moving," the thug said, and indicated the correct direction with the barrel of the zapper, but Lucky grabbed the barrel and swung it instantly out of his hand. She turned the gun on him and zapped him several times. The hooded drone fell to the ground, rolling off into one of the open trash chutes. Lucky and Leon approached him. He was mostly immobile now, and only his fingers were convulsing jerkily, but they stopped moving soon as well. Lucky flipped back his hood with the tip of the long barreled zapper, and Leon flinched slightly: it was Mike. He did not seem to recognize him, but it was hard to tell, as his eyes were frozen open.

Lucky closed the pink trash chute lid down on him, and the alley once again adopted a civil and peaceful expression.

Another figure emerged from the hover that was parked in the alley's back end. Lucky and Leon made a run for it, but the thug quickly caught up with them. He was a somewhat smaller build than the previous one. He was also wearing a hood and, in addition, opaque orange goggles, but Leon recognized him anyway. Lucky was about to zap him when the drone sent a blue jolt of electricity at her, and she collapsed to the ground, pale smoke curling away from one side of her face. Her hair turned jet black.

"Hands up," said the stranger, and Leon raised his hands. EZ looked around, and picked up Lucky's zapper. "Put your hands above your head, turn around, and slowly walk yourself out of the alley. You got that? Start moving!" He prodded Leon with the barrel of the gun. Leon took a few steps, then caught a moment and swung out at him.

His main goal was to get a hold of EZ's fine hands, which carried a far more deadly charge than any regular zapper. They rolled on the ground for a little while - somehow, Leon managed to roll EZ into a corner of the alley, where he finally pinned him against a closed trash chute and got a hold of both his hands. Behind him, he could hear footsteps - it was Lucky. She landed a few hits on EZ's head before Leon was finally able to retrieve the weapon.

He pointed it at EZ. The two of them sat breathlessly for a good three minutes before EZ tried to make a move again.

"Don't even think about it," Lucky said. In her hand was a small personal zapper, camouflaged politely as a lady's compact powder case. It was open and EZ could see himself in the little round mirror. He put his hand up to his face: he was missing his left eye.

"Ah, goddamnit!" he said. "I just got it!" He then proceeded to clean out the orbit full of broken glass with his fingers, which left only the naked-looking aperture of the eye. The petals flexed randomly without their light filter.

"Why are you after us?" Leon asked.

"Huh?" EZ was on his way to developing a sudden case of hard hearing, when Lucky zapped him on the leg. "Agh!" he cried, pulling his leg protectively under him.

"Why are you after us?" Leon repeated, bringing the zapper gun closer to EZ's head. EZ became alarmed.

"It was a mistake...It was an accident."

Lucky zapped him again, and EZ curled up. "You're crazy!" he said, scowling.

Somewhere nearby in the civilized parts of the street, a cheerful crowd went off, followed shortly by the happy, senseless popping of the paper confetti rockets.

Leon tapped EZ on the shoulder.

"I said it was mistake," EZ said.

Leon reached for his phone, but Lucky held him back.

"Wait," she said.

"Why?" inquired Leon. "We have to call the cops on this; this was a kidnapping attempt in broad..."

"There's something I haven't told you yet."

She leaned close to him and whispered something in his ear. Whatever it was had its effect, as Leon immediately put the phone away.

Even through the noise of the parade, they could hear the approaching police sirens. Leon and Lucky took off running.

* * * *

The cop was a drone. He impolitely jerked EZ's arm back and started twisting it into a mono-cuff.

"Why are you arresting me?" EZ inquired plaintively. "I'm innocent! They attacked me!""Oh yeah? You wearin' all that gear for the parade?"

"I'm innocent!" cried EZ, whose eyes were now wandering idly in all directions: after he got zapped by the officer, they seemed to have taken on a life of their own. "Let me go! This is an outrage! Сволочь! Падла! Чтоб тебя!"

"Shut up," the cop said calmly.

"EZ? EZ?" EZ suddenly heard Mike's voice inside his head. "EZ, what's going on, where are you?"

"They're taking me in," EZ voicelessly replied. "Where are you?"

"I'm in the third trash chute down the alley, I'll be out in a coupla hours. What part of..."

"Mike? Mike?" EZ could hear only static now, as the cop led him closer to the hover and in no polite terms shoved him into the disproportionately sized reinforced cage at its back.

A Greyskin had somehow found its way up the downtown trash chute: Mike could hear someone's small, indecisive footsteps coupled with the sound of sharp fingernails pattering about in circles nearby. He was hoping it was just a very big rat.

He was still largely frozen, but after a few hours spent lying jammed in the dumpster, he could finally make some movements with his hands and turn his head. He was testing his neck joints when he turned his head and saw the Greyskin creeping up.

It happily snapped the beak inside its jaws in anticipation when it saw that he was still out. Mike managed a frown - Greyskins could read facial expressions - and made menacing movements with his eyebrows, snapping his jaws loudly several times. The Greyskin issued a hyena-like laugh, but in reality, that was its usual call for backup. Mike tried to move, but he was still stuck. He heard a few more of those hairless rats approaching, yelping and snapping at each other as they went. They were sizing him up. Mike grabbed a metal bar with one hand, but unless he could somehow manage to unfreeze, it would be of little use.

Suddenly, the chute lid snapped open and a large cluster of trash fell inside; it was a street sweeper dumping its cargo. The Greyskins scattered away, squealing unhappily about their interrupted meal. It was a temporary relief.

"Hey!" Mike called the street sweeper. The robot stopped and looked at him with its square, pink eyes. "Help me," he requested.

The robot blinked, uncomprehending, and turned around.

"No! Get back here, you dummy!" he called out, but the street sweeper did not come back, or reply. In a few minutes, the Greyskins began to rustle, when the trash lid opened again, sending gold rays into the dripping dark swamp. Mike looked up in hope through the suspended light beams: unfortunately, it was a cop this time.

THE HOUSE OF SAL

They were back at Leon's room in the all-drone (and Doll) complex called The Upper Deck. The word "Deck" on the sign at its entrance had been defaced inappropriately by local graffiti personnel, but it described the real nature of the place: it was a rundown tenement building of seventy stories, located in the outer district of the city. Its entrance attracted all kinds of trouble, including drug dealers, stray Dolls, and even a small and buggy Locust hauler that regularly dumped hazardous-looking metallic trash right in front of the security gate. No one knew why it did that, and there was no one there to ask, as the green, dirt-stained Locust was unmanned. It diligently brought new garbage and dumped it there every day by the hour. It was a deeply profound mystery, as the local dumpsite was only twenty kilometers away. Thus, thanks to everyone's efforts, the extensive courtyard was heavily littered, as if a trash shooter had bombed it out.

It took them a while to climb the stairs, as the elevator was jammed, and had been, for the last eighty days. Lucky hovered, flying on ahead and pulling Leon along with her up the stairs by both his hands. It was fun!

* * * *

Lucky was looking at herself in the mirror now: the jolt had partially melted one side of her face. Leon was watching her from his vantage point on the recliner sofa. He could see her reflection as she tried to repair herself with a small Deko gun, but it would probably need professional attention. After a while, Lucky gave up and tossed the gun back inside the cabinet.

"Can you at least tell me what you do?" he asked, and Lucky looked indecisively at his reflection.

"I'm a hacker," she said, watching his mirrored face.

For some reason, Leon wasn't surprised to hear that. Lucky turned away from the mirror and walked over to the recliner. She sat down on its edge and began to study Leon's face.

"How long have you been working there?" he asked.

"About three years," Lucky replied. "I was going to tell you, but...I'm not really supposed to tell anyone about this. Please don't tell anyone, Leon."

"No, of course not," he said, and touched her face, running his hand along its undamaged side. "I just don't understand what happened today. Those two bastards will be looking for you now."

"Not after the tune-up we gave them. Besides, one of them is already in jail."

"How do you know that?

"I told you, I'm a hacker."Leon smiled. "Do you think that I could be a hacker, too?" he asked.

"No," Lucky replied, but looked at him more carefully. She climbed onto the recliner and sat down on top of him, her arms and legs akimbo.

"Are you serious, or are you just teasing me?"

"Both," Leon replied, and kissed her kneecap.

The long, rosy shafts of the late afternoon light fell in stripes through the window. No other complex in First City Metro had such blinds, as they were no longer considered modern or practical.

Lucky leaned down on him and put her ear to his side, as if listening for a heartbeat. He could feel the steady beating of her heart, but his own was completely silent, although his cooling fans were spinning faster than usual. They lay for a while in silence, watching the red-eyed fire alarm twinkling on the dusky ceiling of the room. Lucky seemed to be asleep, when she suddenly raised her head and looked at Leon.

"How'd you die?" she asked.

She was a very strange girl.

"I was frozen," he said.

"You were a patient?"

"No. An accident with a cryogun." Leon briefly consulted the fire alarm. "What about you? You don't have to tell me," he quickly added.

Lucky raised her fiery head. "I was in a tram accident. That's all I know. That's all they told me."

"Who told you?" Leon asked, but he did not get to find out.

Lucky suddenly pulled herself up, her eyes wide with fear. Dancing, colorful strings were all that remained of one side of her face where it had touched Leon, and their hands were gradually becoming intertwined, but not in the usual way: the colorful, wiggling strings were everywhere now, spinning and twirling like some kind of bizarre parade streamers, coiling and rising to the ceiling.

"Are you doing this?" Leon asked her, panicking.

"No! What's happening?"

"We're threading!" He tried to free his hand, but couldn't. "Fuck! Pull away now, Lucky, pull as hard as you can! Go!"

Lucky and Leon pulled, but their arms remained fused together. Soon the rest of them began unraveling at an incredible speed, and in a few minutes, there was no trace of them in the room.

They woke up on the floor of a strange, large, grey room that had no windows. It might have been anywhere.

A small group of colorful wobbling shapes immediately surrounded them. They trembled, sending cheerful rainbows all over the room from their transparent, soap bubble-like skins. They wavered indecisively over the pair, as the two figures tried to separate themselves from each other and the grey, polished floor.

One of them moved closer, and said, "Wait a minute...why are there two of them?"

"Two? Where?" another voice asked nearby.

"Right...there," said Sal, and stepped back a little, as the jumbled, intertwined colorful mass finally began to reveal itself.

"Well, that's a surprise," Renjou remarked.

The tangled mass began to move and separate into individual strands and gradually took on the shape of Lucky and Leon. The strands still wiggled and pulled the two in all directions as if they were insane puppets, but finally let them go and they began to form into two distinctly human shapes that resembled soap bubbles: this was the correct security dress code for this particular room in the house of Sal. The Bubble Man and Bubble Girl were trying to pick themselves up off the ground, unsuccessfully so far. Their simulacra were still heavy and rippled like dark liquid glass that was slowly shaping itself into figures from the molten pool on the floor. Their forms gradually became thinner and lighter, although their bubbles still flickered unsteadily, but their facial features were reading better now with every minute. The rest of their bodies remained in a primitive block-in state that only described their forms in quasi-geometric basic shapes.

"Leon?" Renjou said, approaching them. "What's he doing here?"

"I don't know," Lucky replied, getting up.

She pulled up Leon, whose simulacrum lagged lazily on the floor.

"They know you?" he asked.

"Sort of."

JELLYBRAIN

"The code was always in Nina," Saleri said.

"But I thought that I'd built it!"Saleri issued a quiet, brief laugh that was more of a guffaw. "No, Leon. The code was always there. Your antics with Rosie just woke him up."

"Who is she really?" Leon asked.

"We don't know," replied Saleri. "She appeared sometime around 4270, that's where we found her in the Temple while we still had direct access, but there is no record of her ever existing - anywhere. Our search for her cryopod might just be us chasing our tails." He looked over at Sam, whose simulacrum was picking absently at its nose - for some reason, that was the default cycle his Bubble Man performed when he had to leave the house temporarily.

"What will happen once you find her, if she does exist?"

"We will try to get to Dabel. Hopefully, we might be able to wake her up and bring her here, but that's a stretch. For now, we just need to concentrate on the Temple. That's why we brought Lucky, but it's good that you came along too." Saleri's simulacrum managed a smile.

"Have you tried anything yet?" Renjou asked Leon.

"No, not really. I only got a chance back in October - I finally found a good machine I could use."

Renjou became instantly alarmed. "What machine? What did you do?"

"I just made a warning in the form of a listing."

"What listing?" Renjou seemed more alarmed now than ever.

"It's just a directory of names and dates that point to the war."

"Wait a minute!" Renjou's pacing Bubble Man stopped in his tracks, wobbling from the inertia. "You made the Directory?"

Leon's Bubble Man stepped back a little. "Yes...I thought it would be a good idea to leave some kind of warning."

"Oh God," Renjou said. "I knew it!" He looked over at Sam's simulacrum, but it was still running on empty, one finger up its nose. "I knew it was you. Take that damn thing off the network right now."

"Why?"

"We don't need another thing for people to go nuts over." Renjou dismally surveyed Leon's flickering Bubble Man. "Also, remind me to fire you in case we get back." He glanced over briefly at Lucky, then Sam, whose simulacrum had suddenly abandoned its bad habit. "We're going to show you the new db. Come with us, Allison," Renjou said, and his Bubble Man flinched slightly as he exited it.When Lucky had gone out of the room with Renjou and Sam, leaving a group of empty bubble figures wavering conspiratorially in the doorway, Saleri turned to Leon.

"What do you think?" he said. "Can we make it?"

"I don't know," Leon replied. "I hope so."

"How did you get in?"

"We threaded with Lucky."

"Hmm...interesting. What were you doing when you threaded?"

The question sounded invasively direct, but Saleri had to know everything. This was, after all, his house, and people were breaking and tumbling into it all the time, and sometimes, apparently, they came in pairs and through the window. If this was the best level of security they could get, he could only imagine what could be happening back at the Foundry.

"We were together," Leon's Bubble Man offered, avoiding the more obvious answer to Sal's question.

"All right," Saleri conceded. "You were together," he repeated, smiling thinly through his simulacrum.

"What do you want with us, anyway?"

"Good question, jellybrain. You can start working here tomorrow."

"I can't. I'm going away on cleanup."

"You don't have to," Saleri's bubble said.

"I don't even have a Metro ID yet," Leon began. "By law..." He suddenly broke off and looked at the opposite room corner: Renjou was watching him humorously with his two glinting pieces of obsidian. Neither Sal nor Leon noticed when he had returned.

"Screw the law," Renjou said mildly. "We'll get you a new ID."

THE FOUNDRY

Bailey was a beautiful black cat. Unlike those cheap imitations, Bailey was a 100% natural feline who often reeked unwholesomely of fish and other things that were probably its by-products. Bailey spent much of her time sunning herself and grooming with clandestine pleasure on the single windowsill that belonged to the large, singular arch-like window on the Foundry's second floor. The gently curving arc of the window almost reached the ceiling.

She was a permanent fixture at the Foundry, although she seemed to belong to no one in particular; she just liked the place. Occasionally, she snuck up to Renjou to be petted, and secretly, he relished her attention, but he was only pleasantly flattering himself. Bailey belonged to no one.Leon was watching her now. She was sitting on the sunlit windowsill and cleaning her face with one paw. Her big, blue eyes squinted pleasurably whenever she turned her head, as the shafts of light coming from the window crossed them.

"Bailey," he called her. He knew that she'd heard him, but she ignored him, continuing with her toilette. Leon watched the fine, dynamic lines of her neck and shoulders, silhouetted against the bright light. She reminded him of an ancient Egyptian statuette. There was something sublime about her. She was pure, and relatively simple, and completely unconcerned by the problems over which the hackers tortured themselves, hacking away at each other daily in that small room inside the Foundry.In a way, Leon envied the cat.

Renjou came into the room, carrying a roll of red sticky tape.

"What's that for, Renjou?" inquired Lucky."If they won't stop blocking the entrance, I'll glue it all over their hover," he said, dropping the roll of tape into a desk cabinet. He slammed it shut.

"Legally, you can't do anything about it. If this was a tag of, say, spray paint or some kind of physical damage..." Renjou trailed off, because Bailey had just finished her clandestine grooming session and jumped off the window sill. She walked up to him, rubbing up against his ankles. She arched herself, her warm body taut with muscle that rippled beneath her short fur. Renjou reached down and attempted to pick her up, but she snuck away from him and headed for the door with her tail held up straight. She paused briefly in the doorway, rubbing up against the doorframe, and proceeded out of the room without saying a proper adieu to anyone.Renjou turned to Leon.

"What are we doing today?" he asked.

"We've been trying to get inside Junction 857," replied Leon. "But it's too heavily secured in that part. I burned out two caps just trying to get in." Leon vaguely indicated the trash can in the corner, from the top of which peered out a molten hacker's cap. It was also called a "shower cap" due to its shape before it became adjusted to the individual user.

"Lucky?"

"I found where they keep the dates, but that area is all wrapped back on itself - there's another gate in front of the one I tried to break into, and it sent me right back to the beginning.""What about the Dead End?" Renjou asked, almost in passing, because he knew that it was really their last option.

Lucky and Leon had not yet been to the Dead End. It was a one-way hallway, with only one exit - or rather, entrance, whose namesake end was blocked by a black, sealed wall. In the real world, it would be referred to as a cul-de-sac or a dead end. It was a short passage, but they tended to avoid it. If the Shadows caught them there, they would never be able to get back.

"There has been a problem lately getting through," Leon said. He hated lying, but that really was the case.

In addition to Leon and Lucky, there were five more experienced hackers working for Renjou at the Foundry: Mari and Victor "Coco" Laroux, Chris Chi, better known as "Chi-Chi," and two quiet, almost mute voiders named Curly and Kirby C., who spent most of their free time loitering sullenly around the Foundry, especially when the work was slow, or jointly listening to music in the void holding hands. (They never were busted, however.) With the exception of the Larouxs', these were not their real names, but they had their reasons for the secrecy.

Mari and Victor, who was better known as "Speedy Coco," or just plain "Coco," were very close, as were Curly and Kirby, and they tended to pair up and go out into the void in two-by-two's: they felt safer that way, even though pairing up did not guarantee any added safety.

Mari Laroux, née Stefano, was an excellent hacker, if at times a bit temperamental, but her skills could unquestionably be described as top class. Although she was a more or less regular human without any modifications, with only one exception, or rather - two of them, she could quickly open almost any security gate using only her bare hands.

Mari and Coco quarreled often, made up often, and then quarreled again, so that at long last, Renjou offered them an ultimatum: if they did not stop bickering, he threatened to send them back to Kindergarten, which was a sarcastic name for a very low grade hackers group, composed mainly of delinquent underage drones and hacker Ronin with suspended licenses. This ultimatum raised such havoc that even Renjou felt obliged to leave the stormy room. He returned a few hours later and peered cautiously inside it, checking to see if the storm had subsided a bit. It had.

Unarguably, the mild-mannered, good-natured Chris "Chi-Chi" was the only gentleman among them all: he never raised his voice, made offensive hand gestures or quarreled with anyone, even when the situation became extremely frustrating, which happened more often now than they liked to admit, even to themselves. Renjou knew everyone, so they wouldn't have to open their mouths to speak.

THE MC

Renjou liked to wear a dark-green felt fedora, especially when it was raining. He'd always take it with him when going home, even when the weather was fine outside. Sometimes, he'd also wear it indoors. Rather than being a fashion statement, however, it seemed to serve more as a protective helmet.

He wore it especially often when they were hacking into the Temple from the Foundry. Renjou was the MC. He directed them inside the Temple, acted as their pull out in case of an emergency, and sent updates and new directions by the second.

They simultaneously heavily resented and deeply trusted him.

He rarely went inside with them, mostly because he had more pressing business with Sam and Saleri. Sometimes he could be gone for entire weeks and would not answer calls or respond to messages. The Founders had a somewhat vague idea of what Renjou was up to at Sal's house, as he never told them the details. It was easier that way.They had slightly less than two months now to track down Dabel. Renjou had long given up on finding the physical location of Nina's cryopod. According to the latest information he received from Saleri, it did not exist yet. Their only hope was to find its simulacrum inside the extensive, complicated Temple. The plan sounded simple enough: they would get inside the Temple, find Nina's cryopod and wake her up, then thread her back to the Foundry. After that, assuming things went the right way, the Temple would be compromised from the inside: Sam was certain that it would succumb to a few well-placed compression or trip bombs, and had spent all this time preparing Renjou and lecturing him on how to properly design, build, and use them inside this particular database. It accounted for Renjou's constant absence from the little room at the Foundry, where the seven hackers hacked each other to bits daily over mistakes, mishaps, glitches, annoying personal traits, and many other sorts of things.

Sam was also getting frustrated: it was a major disadvantage not to be able to directly touch or tweak anything. A few times, Sam's Bubble Man showed his impatience with Renjou by knocking its transparently empty fist on his thick head. They were supposed to destroy the virus before the year's end - after that no one was sure what would happen. Their last backup was slowly exhausting itself.Mainly, however, the sheer boredom got to them the most. Days, weeks passed, and yet there was not a single sign of Nina's cryopod or even a Shadow guardian, just dummy automatons. This was embarrassing; to everyone's credit, it meant they had still not even remotely approached any secured area. The Temple kept chucking them out at every turn. They hacked through thousands of gates this way, one by one, painstakingly: it seemed useless, and, worst of all, completely hopeless. The Temple was a giant, and they were trying to find a needle in all the haystacks.

* * * *

Coco was truly fearless now: in the first fork of hallways before Junction 857, Leon saw him reach out and pinch Lucky's simulacrum. She immediately spun around and pinched him right back.

"C'est la vie," he said, with a faintly registering scowl, or grin. "C'est une dame délicate."

They walked further down the hallway that branched to their left. It was silent and empty there, as usual.

After Renjou pulled them all out, Coco swore that he would actually like to see a Shadow sometime. Renjou's black eyes shot him an incinerating dark look, and Coco subsided in his chair. He scowled at the cluster of flickering monitors, rubbing the small of his back with both hands.

"My ass is killing me," he said. "I need to take a break."

Renjou did not seem to mind, and Coco got up and walked out.

A month later, and well into December, they still had not found Nina's location inside the Temple, although they had made some progress with the junctions after the 857th gate. Renjou was already at the end of his usually short patience. He darted dirty looks at everyone like an angry cobra, running around the room in circles with hands folded behind his back. A few times, he entered the Temple with Lucky, Mari, and Leon, but the place was now so densely booby-trapped with automata they were thrown out immediately after breaking through the first security gate with Mari's help.

Renjou tore off his cap and threw it into the trashcan, for it had burned his scalp. The damage was minor, but his hair was standing on end. He lashed out first at Coco, who was salaciously grinning at him behind his back in the shiny mirror of Renjou's dead screen: Coco was on duty that time and had missed the right point in their entry timing, causing the gate to bounce all of them back the moment they walked in. Chi-Chi tried to put in a few good words in defense of Coco Laroux, but they went unheard in the mounting noise inside the room.

Finally, Chi-Chi gave up and spent some time loitering in the dark corner near the junk metal bookcase. It was an old bookcase Renjou had hauled in from some flea market in Tarmagant Square, and it appeared to be made from the parts of an industrial grade refrigerator. Its slippery shelves were starkly empty of books and contained only one flimsy security manual, which had somehow become a permanent fixture on its lower shelf, possibly because it was glued to the surface with its worn out rubber-coated cover. No one knew how it got there, as it was outdated by about fifty years, although Renjou insisted that it came with the bookcase, née refrigerator. A few storage bins of various shapes, colors, and sizes occupied the remaining shelves. Most of them were full of frozen or damaged equipment and other defunct, toxic trash. On one of the lower shelves, Chi-Chi noticed a dark, dried out roach exoskeleton. It was a common, medium-sized house roach, and chances were good that it was watching them even now from somewhere inside the Foundry - most likely, the kitchen.

He could hear Leon and Renjou talking now, and, judging by their voices, the situation had become slacker.

"We keep getting thrown out at the first gate," Leon's voice said.

"Which gate?"

"Before 857." Leon showed him the graph, and the smooth running lines ended in a twisted cluster that identified a crack.

"Isn't that the Dead End?" Renjou asked him.

"We're not sure yet," Leon replied. "I wish," he added quietly under his breath.

Like a shy Cupid, Chi-Chi peered out cautiously from his hiding place behind the bookcase. He surveyed the room with some apprehension on his pleasantly round face, but the storm around Renjou seemed to have already subsided. Chi-Chi was a bit on the heavy side, and his slowness - as well as good nature and sheer surface area - often made him the prime, if only accidental, target of verbal and sometimes physical projectiles that were often sent flying at such times through the room.

"Renjou, don't be such a party piss," Coco said, taking out a new shower cap from the yellow storage bin on the bookshelf."Party poop," Mari corrected him, eyeing Renjou darkly. Mari was a beautiful woman whose age could not be guessed, for many reasons. She had a strawberry shaped face and gently rippling, light auburn hair that was styled very much like Muriel Evans' - it was a new hairstyle that had recently come into fashion called the Deko, because people who could not afford a decent hair dressing often resorted to using a gently heated Deko gun as a hair curler. The results were not always predictable, or reliable.

"Renjou, don't be such a party poop," Coco corrected himself. "There's nothing we can do around in there."

"You're a lazy bum," Renjou said, "and a coke fiend. Why did I ever hire you in the first place? I'm not paying you to do crack!"

"What would you like us to do, Renjou?" retorted the fiend. "The Temple is just énorme." Coco was fired up now, and unusually pale in the face. His dark eyes sparkled emptily. He took out his black reticule in plain sight of Renjou and opened it, pulling it by its strings and looking transparently into Renjou's eyes. He pulled open the tightly gathered mouth and took out a small, polished black case that seemed to have previously housed Mari's nose powder. He opened it declaratively and dipped his thin, long nose into it. Coco inhaled its sparkly contents with relish, then tilted back his head and looked obliquely over at Renjou. Some of the powder remained on his nose, and Mari indicated it to her husband, brushing off some imaginary snowflakes with her hand, but Coco did not care. He got out of his hexchair, even though he was supposed to be in it for another eight hours, and walked out of the room, hands in pockets. They watched his tall, lean figure disappear into the hallway to the left: chances were Coco was on his way to the can to revive himself further.

Renjou put on his hat.

"There's no respect for hard work anymore around here," he said, wiping off the sweat that had beaded up glistening on his forehead. "You're all lazy bums!" He paused to survey them one last time from the doorway. "When I get here tomorrow, you better be in there, or I'll kick you all out on your asses." He had almost shut the door, but then it reopened slightly, forming a dark narrow gap: "And stop doing crack!" it added, and the door finally closed behind him with a quiet but pronounced sharp snap.

"Why?" Chi-Chi inquired, after Renjou had definitely left. "I say it's purely recreational use," he said, and winked at Leon.

LOCUST

The next day, Renjou was absent entirely. As they later learned, he was not at work again with Sam, but had instead gone down to the local police station to report the annoying green Locust hauler that had recently began parking right in front of the Foundry's garage entrance gate. The back door was the entrance of choice for getting inside the building, as they went unnoticed in their hovers on and off the street.

It was a sore point with all of them by now, and Renjou finally decided to resolve things in person by going down to the local station. He had tried reporting it many times, but it only resulted in a series of routine traffic tickets that the police drone dutifully left glued to the troublesome hover's rear window. Every day, at around eight-thirty in the morning, the annoying, iridescently green Locust showed up at their gate, hogging up the entrance like a fat, shimmering garbage fly.

It was strange to see one of those big machines parked along a regular city street. The Locust was huge. It was a common hover used for hauling large items on the back of its extensive, closed rear deck. They were called Locusts for their standard coat of paint - an iridescent green color, and were usually found around areas like waste disposal sites and the upper levels of sewer systems. Occasionally, they were used for transporting large aircraft or other Locusts whenever they broke down. It looked rather funny when the case was the latter, because the two towing Locusts resembled a pair of mating flies. What it was doing in the middle of a residential street in the Metro's outer downtown district was unclear. There was no way to tow it, even if the police had assisted them, because they would need a special hover, probably another Locust, to get it out of the way, and it would have to be brought in from another district, and maybe even another Palisade. For the police, it meant a lot of trouble, and with the current state of things and the approaching holidays, they tried to delay their response to the situation for as long as they could.They could never even catch a glimpse of its elusive pilot. They placed security cameras above the entrance, but they showed nothing. Together with the rest of the Founders, Renjou watched the playback. He asked them what they thought of it, but no one knew what to think. The Founders, who had some very experienced hackers and coke fiends in their ranks, had never before seen a giant hauler do a disappearing trick, and they assumed it was a problem with the cameras. They got new ones, but the playback did not change one bit: the Locust appeared and disappeared with the regularity of a very diligent mirage.

Renjou suspected foul play and increased the security around the Foundry. They crawled all over the building, sometimes quite literally on all fours, scanning every nook and cranny for a possible breach, but everything seemed perfectly normal.

Renjou was very concerned, because usually things did not appear and disappear without a reason. Still distrustful of their electronics, they began taking turns every day watching it from the window. At one point in their battle against the invisible operator, Renjou, Coco and Mari stayed up into the wee hours, lying in wait by the window and listening for the sound of a starting cooling fan, but there was no sound. Eventually, the three of them fell asleep, and when Renjou awoke some forty-five minutes later, there was, once again, no trace of the sneaky Locust.

The policeman who answered Renjou's plea for help was always the same drone. He was a standard "enhanced" police model, which were becoming more popular these days. The officer spoke politely and calmly, letting Renjou know that they would take care of it, but not today.

"Why?" asked Renjou.

"It's the holidays," the cop replied quietly, rolling up a Flex-O pad in his hands like a medieval scroll. "We're just overloaded right now - please wait until tomorrow." He pulled on the bill of his officer's cap. "I'm really sorry for the inconvenience, sir," he added, and walked out of the vicinity of Renjou who watched him get into his hover and drive away.

When Renjou returned the following day, his immediate path through the room took him directly to the big window. He lifted up one corner of the window screen and peered outside. He arched his back, and Bailey looked at him, surprised, with her two round blue reflectors.

"That's it?" he said, addressing no one in particular. He turned around, looking for support.

"What happened?" Mari asked him. "Did the cops show up?"

"The cop showed up \- but all he did was leave a lousy ticket. Again!"

"That might work," Leon said.

"It's the fifth one!" Renjou let the curtain fall back down, and perched on the windowsill. Bailey came to sit on his lap. "If they don't do something about it soon, I will."

TROUBLE

It appeared that Renjou's antics with the red sticker tape had no effect on the elusive Locust's pilot, as the green hauler returned to its exact same spot the next day. The red tape was meant as a harmless warning. The delicately carved wings of Renjou's nose flared open. It would have been very fitting if they'd also emitted two streams of cartoon steam or smoke.

Now, it was personal.

The next day, Mari looked out the window and saw a very peculiar looking craft parked in the Foundry's back gateway. Its overall shape resembled the pesky Locust, but otherwise it was hard to recognize it now.

The windshield, sides, trunk, and haul deck of the Locust were densely covered with permanent graffiti tags, done mostly in a boringly unvaried black color, with various, and rather personal, elaborations and incrustations of junk metal parts. Under cover of night, Renjou had stealthily decorated the hover to the best of his ability, as well as memory. He thought about which tags to make for some time before actually carrying out his master plan.

He sprayed on medium-sized tags in black paint all over its sides and back, and then took care of the windshield, which was covered opaquely by the dark grey sunscreen of its eyelid.He sprayed on another tag and stepped back to survey his work, which crawled in well-designed arabesques all over the hover. "Shit," he said, noticing, to his chagrin, that he'd misspelled it, and took out a new can of paint. He shook it and painted another, larger tag to cover up the original mistake. It was a professional as well as personal embarrassment, and he did not feel like leaving it behind just in case someone caught him at it.

"Way to recycle the empties!" Chi-Chi said, surveying the hover from their big second story window.

Overall, Renjou was quite pleased with his work and observed the defiled Locust proudly from his perch on the windowsill. Bailey was sitting next to him, and he was scratching her behind one of her batty ears. She purred pleasurably in the warm, hard cup of his left hand.

He looked around, pausing a little for emphasis. "Do you think they'll come back?" he asked. It seemed to be a collective question, but no one responded. Kirby just scratched his head.

Lucky stretched out in her chair. "I hope you won't get into trouble for that," she said, overtaken by a long, deliberate-looking yawn.

"That's what I'm here for," announced Renjou.

On the following day, outrageously enough, the Locust had returned. To boot, it looked exactly the way it did before its encounter with Renjou.

"Motherfucker!" Renjou said, and spat on the Foundry's checkered floor.

By the end of the day, Renjou had exhausted his impressively extensive vocabulary of appropriate words, and had instead resorted to using synonyms and similes.

"This is just unbelievable," he said, pacing. "I don't understand this at all."

The persistent Renjou made one more attempt: under cover of darkness, he used a cryogun to quietly take down the windshield. It was a lot of trouble and was very dangerous, for many reasons.The surface trembled, crackling a little, and suddenly became pretty with a flowery pattern of ice.

Renjou lightly poked the frosted screen with the barrel of the cryogun, and it disintegrated, whispering its last words through the crystalline blue dust. He had already disabled the alarm. While he was digging below the Locust's greasy underbelly, Renjou suddenly began to recollect his past. When he was a bit younger, he used to do this for a living. He thought about the previous year, and wondered what the db had turned up.

Renjou looked around him warily, and then peered inside the craft. It had a standard one-pilot cabin, sometimes jokingly called a "one and a half."

There was a typical control panel and dim blue shimmering interior lights. He searched the cabinets and wrote down the serial numbers of the craft.

Later, he looked it up. According to the results, it did not exist anywhere.

CAT IN THE BAG

There was a bakery below their floor, which frequently broke down and smoked, sometimes matching the situation on the second floor quite literally. Its logo at the entrance was a big round O, which represented a big donut. On those mornings when it wasn't on fire, it smelled intoxicatingly of baking sweet breads, and Chi-Chi often returned from the first floor with a box or two of powdered or glazed donuts in his hands. He usually left the donuts in the kitchen, unless he was really, really hungry for them. Early on the morning of December 13th, Chi-Chi returned to find the small room empty, with only Bailey and Leon as his hosts. They were both asleep in Leon's chair. Recently, Bailey had developed a habit of sleeping curled up on Leon while he was in void mode. No one knew why she preferred him for her sleeping habits, but every time Leon put on his cap, she would immediately interrupt whatever she was doing and climb to sleep away a few hours on top of his silver Nelcro breastplate.

Perhaps it was warm there on the panels, or maybe she found him a decent enough substitute for Renjou, who was often away, but she did it quite regularly. Unlike Chi-Chi, who had an allergy to fur, and cats, Leon did not mind it. Besides, it was good to see the stupid cat. Chi-Chi had to shun Bailey, however, although she often tried to make him her useful friend. The only favor he could do for her was preparing her meals, which no one liked to do because of their fishy smell.It was still very early, and Chi-Chi carefully set down the donut box by the window and returned to his hexchair. He climbed into it, trying not to wake the hacker and the cat. He glanced over at the pair next to him for confidence and set to work.

Chi-Chi's concentration was quickly interrupted almost as soon as he got into the right frequency. First, he had to pull out to feed Bailey, who was meowing and clawing at his feet. Then Mari appeared and asked for his help around the kitchen. While he was away, Coco had returned from an all-nighter at the Foundry, which usually meant that he was depleted of energy - and crack. The day was just starting, and he was already late.Coco stumbled through the doorway, looking hazily all around the room. For some reason, he kept pointing at his hexchair.

"Take your cat out of that thing," he said, pointing at his reticule, which lay in the chair in a collapsed pile of black.

"What are you talking about, Coco?" Lucky asked him.

"The cat is inside my bag!" Coco exclaimed.

"And it's sniffing my crack. It's mine, so fuck off, Renjou." He stumbled over to his chair and pulled the bag open by its drawstrings. There was nothing inside.

Everyone stared at him. He was slowly crawling on all fours toward Bailey, who was busy grooming herself on the windowsill. She looked up, surprised, momentarily pausing her ritual as Coco peered at her over the edge.

"Coco, how high are you this morning?" Mari asked him.

"I'm not high at all," Coco replied.

"What the hell are you doing?" Renjou inquired.

Coco was trying to catch Bailey, but she spun away from him, hissing, and hid on top of the bookcase.

"Get down from there!" Coco yelled. "I'm going to find you anyway." He shook his fists at the empty black space above. Then he looked back at Renjou.

"There," he said, pointing. "There is a cat in the bag."

Lucky smiled, because her hand was threading with Leon's, but they pulled away from each other just in time. "Coco, are you all right?" she asked. "Because none of us see the cat in the bag." She leaned back in her chair as Leon pulled away his hand.

Mari averted her pale hazel-blue eyes from the scene to look at Renjou on top of the bookcase. He was enjoying the view and grinning happily through the cat's face.

"Renjou," Mari said, "how long have you been keeping him out?"

"Not long," Renjou offered.

"How long?"

"You know, I'm not good with numbers, Mari," Bailey replied from the darkness. "There's a place you can check."

"Pain in the ass," Mari said, and tuned out.

"Now where did it go?" Coco spun around and looked at Renjou. Both of his hands dove inside his coat pockets. He raised his head plaintively.

"Give it back, or I'll start singing again," he threatened, but Renjou kept the black box up in the air. (Coco had a very annoying habit of humming to himself while he worked: it drove Renjou, sometimes literally, up the wall. Renjou retaliated by suspending Coco's crack case just below the Foundry's ceiling, and watched with glee as the addict jumped up and down trying to get it back.)

"I should you call you Caca, not Coco," Renjou commented, watching his antics: Coco was now attempting to climb the wall.

"Renjou, you bitch, I need it now! Give it back!"

His long, bony, pale fingers reached for it, but the little black box always wiggled out of his hands.

"Pray to me, Coco," invited Renjou.Coco succumbed to a low on the floor, after which Renjou dropped the case on top of his head, spilling its contents. Coco jolted awake in a few moments, and began picking it up. The rest of the Founders pretended not to see him. Renjou grimaced from his perch on the windowsill, and laughed. Coco gave him a very profane look and resumed crawling on all fours.

Then he lay down right on the checkered floor next to Mari's chair. He grabbed one edge of it and rocked it gently back and forth, causing Mari to drop her headphones.

"Get off your ass," Renjou commanded, but Coco remained calm on the floor. He put his hands under his head and began to drift off to sleep in the center of the Foundry.

"It's beautiful," Coco said suddenly from the floor. He raised one hand and looked for some reason through its fingers. "How ridiculous, isn't it, Mari?" he whispered. His other hand was on its way up to Mari, but she held it off from reaching its final destination - her breast.

"Victor, get up," she told him. "It's time to get to work."

He rolled over and adopted a less slouching position. "Who's there?" he asked, looking around.

Leon was in the gate before the tricky hallway they called the Dead End. Before he went out, he ate one of the donuts just in case. He wasn't sure if this was only a technical term. Mari had already opened it for him. He was inspecting the wall in front of him for any signs of life, which usually began to appear as revolting, crawling dark cracks just before the hallway tossed them out in the open.

The rest of the voiders had pulled out all at once, leaving only him: the idea was to trick the gate into thinking there was no one there - kind of like as if there was a crowd inside a room, which then vanished suddenly, leaving no one in sight, while the sneaky intruder crawled to his destination under the rug on the floor.

Leon touched the wall and felt it waver like a sheet of water, after which the black round gate at the end of the cul-de-sac began to shrink and spin. Its spinning intensified in a clockwise direction, which meant that it was opening. Leon was excited: this was a definite change.

"Renjou! It's moving!" he said to his transmitter.

"What's it doing?" Renjou quickly asked.

"Spinning, really fast."

"Is it getting any smaller?"

"Yeah, a lot smaller."

"Shit," he said, quietly. "Don't go near it and don't touch anything - I'm going to pull you out now."

"Why? It's opening!" Leon was mesmerized by the spinning gate and wanted to find out where it went. He could already feel Renjou's tug as he began pulling him out. Leon had a very childish desire not to let him succeed, but something made him finally succumb to the invisible pull of his hand.

"Pull out," Leon said, and his Bubble Man disappeared from the Dead End.

"Why'd you pull me out?" Leon asked, fidgeting with his shower cap. "It was just letting me in."

Renjou gave him a scornful look, as if his question did not truly deserve an answer, but then said, anyway, "If the gate was spinning and shrinking, it means it was a Fry Pan."What's that mean?" Leon asked, pulling off his cap.

"It means it'll fry you once you're in there. And possibly compress you. That's why I pulled you out. In fact, now I don't think it goes anywhere at all." He looked over at Bailey for some reason, and they seemed to have an understanding. "Don't get compressed, Leon, I don't need any more squeezed out bubbles around here," he added, and put on his dark hat.

SHOCK WAVE

Renjou was absent the next day, and they had to be extra watchful. They tried to be, anyway. By evening, they expected his return, but Renjou was nowhere to be found. He was not at Sal's house or at his apartment in the "Beastro", and did not respond to anyone's calls.Something crashed.

The multiple-pronged cables fell to the floor, shooting out a large ring of static that zapped around Leon's chair. He jerked awake and threw off his burning cap. As Lucky and Coco were helping him to get out, another cable came loose and tumbled on top of them. Bailey hissed and arched her back, and promptly jumped away to the floor.

"What happened?" Lucky asked him.

"I don't know," Leon said. "It just started doing that as soon as I was in."

Coco surveyed the damage to the ceiling: it was burned with green concentric rings. "Well," he said, his black eyes scanning the walls, "that's not the worst that could happen. Right, Mademoiselle Lucky?"

"Whatever," responded Lucky, and pulled off her cap.

"Where's Bailey?" Chi-Chi suddenly said from his chair. They looked around the room. Their first targets were the windowsill and the top of the junk metal refrigerator.

They searched for Bailey all day, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Renjou knocked on the door. There was no reply.

He turned away and went out of the building. He walked for a while down the street, trying to remember the right window. It was a five-story complex made of classic red brick and glass. He walked around the building, at times standing up on his toes to peer inside. On the corner of 5th and Mason, he saw her walk by.She was dressed as usual in a black leather jacket and black suit, and was carrying a paper grocery bag under one arm. Most likely, she had just returned from work. Standing on the corner, Renjou silently tried to catch her eye. She passed him by without paying him any attention.

He tailed her at some distance and saw her walk back to the complex and disappear inside. He walked over to the corner and stood under the windows, rummaging through the pockets of his coat for a light. Soon he saw her reappear in the third story window, as Union almost always left open the blinds. She undressed down to her underwear and peered outside, someone was coming. She turned away from the window, and briefly adjusted her hair in front of the large, walnut-shaped mirror that had often reflected them both in the past. She turned a little this way and that way in front of the mirror, an act that usually brought Renjou a strange but perfectly lucid high, and then went to answer the door, as the doorbell had silently rung.

His hands were shaking. He tried to forget, but the memory kept pushing its way inside. He lit up and stood still for a while, dragging on the thick smoke.

He kept watching them until they noticed him and pulled down the blinds.

COPYCAT

Bailey reappeared the next day just as spontaneously as she had disappeared. Coco had just pulled Leon out, and Leon awoke to find Bailey sitting on his lap. He reached out to touch her, but she hissed, bristling her short, black fur like a terrorized caterpillar, and jumped over his head. She landed on Chi-Chi's nearby headrest, which still served as a place of repose for his head, and in terror, she clawed his face and made her way to the very top of the metal bookcase. There she became motionless and silent; her blue eyes burning like two reflectors out of the darkness.

"Bailey, come down here," Renjou invited, standing in front of the bookcase and looking up at the cowering, black mass. Bailey seemed even smaller than usual, and did not respond to his request.

Afterwards, she never again came near Leon.

After a while, everyone had almost forgotten about the Bailey incident, as it came to be called, perhaps with the exception of Chi-Chi, who still had band-aids all over his face and neck, but the damage was not permanent. He made up for it with plenty of coffee and donuts, and even smoked. Once.

Their forays into the Temple in search of Nina were still yielding no results. The area they concentrated on most now was gate 099867. It seemed entirely out of reach, as they kept getting thrown back to the entrance every time they passed through it. This was only a basic security barrier, as it appeared, and the Founders felt very uncomfortable thinking of what the next one might do to them.

On their next entry into the Temple, Leon noticed a small black shape that appeared just ahead in the hallway in front of them. This time, Leon was accompanied by Lucky and Curly, and Kirby, whose Bubble Men hung out so close together that they became conjoined at the sides.

At first, Leon anticipated a Shadow, but he was wrong: the small black ball rolled toward them through the hallway and uncurled nearby into a fuzzily described black cat, whose fur looked more like the bristles on a caterpillar.

"I think we just found our cat," Leon said, moving a bit closer to pick it up.

"Wait, Leon, " Lucky said, her bubble hand reaching out to restrain him. "It can't be Bailey - let's ask Coco. Coco?"

"Oui, Mademoiselle Lucky?"

"Can you check where Bailey is?"

"What for?"

"Just please do it," Lucky said.

The cat-like caterpillar was presently grooming itself with one stubby paw. It washed its face, which was just like Bailey's and had light blue eyes. They stood out strangely in its dark face. It was the most well rendered aspect of this thing, which otherwise looked like a black tube sock with short, stubby legs that resembled toilet plungers.

Coco's voice came back online, and he said, "Yes, she's right here. Why? What's happening, Lucky?"

"Nothing. We just saw a black cat."

"Try to touch it," Renjou's voice suggested, "but be careful - pull away immediately if it starts to thread, you got that? It'll look like it's eating you."Leon reached his hand toward the cat, and it came up to him, rubbing briefly against it and purring with pleasure. The purring sounded a bit more like low-pitch static than a real cat's purr, but it was a pleasant, low sound.

"It seems ok," Lucky said. "What do we do now? Should we bring it back?"

"No!" said Renjou. "Leave it there. In fact, don't touch it anymore. Or anything, I'm going to pull you out."

Renjou had already successfully bounced out Curly and Kirby's conjoined bubble twins, but Lucky hesitated. "Let's wait," she said. "Maybe..." She trailed off.

Bailey's caterpillar twin suddenly turned around and began to stroll away from them down the hallway. It did so very lazily, as if cutting them some slack. Lucky moved in its direction.

"Lucky," Renjou's voice returned threateningly. "What the hell are you doing? I told you both to pull back."

"Just a few steps, Renjou, I want to see where it goes," Lucky replied, as she and Leon followed Bailey down the hallway.Bailey stopped walking for a minute and sat down, scratching her neck with her extended hind leg. Then she briefly groomed her nethers, and proceeded to lead them through the Temple.

The cat stopped at one of the doors. She pawed it, and it opened: inside, Lucky and Leon could only see pitch black. They consulted each other's bubble faces. Leon nodded once, and stepped into the room, holding on to the doorframe just in case for balance. Lucky came and peered over his shoulder, but there was not much to see.The room was very small and dim. It reminded Leon of some place he'd seen before, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. Slowly, a small, greenish light appeared in one corner of the room, lighting it a bit better. Leon flickered and stepped back, stubbing Lucky's toe.

"What?" she asked, trying to see what made Leon step on her bubble.

"It's Nina's room," he said, and turned back.

They stood for a while in the hallway, deliberating. The cat had gone, and they did not remember the way back, although they knew that Renjou could pull them out at any minute. Finally, Leon decided to chance it.

"Wait here," he said, and stepped again into the room.

The green hovering lantern illuminated it even brighter, and he could see the empty cryopod. Its black, frozen mouth stood gaping in the middle of the room. He peered inside. Its interior was covered with a thick residue layer that looked like, but was not, ice.

"Leon!" a voice called him. He shuddered, and turned around. He looked at her over his shoulder, but Lucky just looked back at him.

"What?"

"What?"

"I thought you'd called me," Leon said.

"No, I didn't," Lucky replied. "What's in there?"

"Nothing. It's empty."

"I want to see," Lucky said, and before Leon could say anything, she walked into the room. The door shut suddenly behind her, and she jumped.

"Leon, Lucky! Pull out!" They heard Renjou's voice say, before it was cut off.

They tried to reach Renjou again, but the line remained silent. After that, they both took turns pulling on the door.

"Merde!" Leon said, looking around. He did not recall when he'd started using French. The room's walls were patterned with old brown wallpaper whose flowery designs looked more like ink stains.

Lucky looked up at the ceiling. "What do we do now?" she asked no one in particular.

"We wait. If they know where we are, they'll find us."

"And if they don't?" Lucky said, her Bubble Man rubbing its hands; it was getting colder inside this room by the minute.

Leon had no definite answer to that, and began inspecting the walls of the room and the green hover-torchiere that floated in the corner. It was a standard model, like hundreds of others that were used to decorate interior space back in the day.

They waited some more.

DUST

"It's so cold here," Lucky said. Her bubble had shrunk slightly and was growing smaller the longer they stood there. Leon continued his inspection of the walls, but he could find no hidden gates, odd numbers, or any signs that this was a trap. It looked as if they'd just fallen into a sleep room, but no one here was asleep. Not yet.

He returned to the cryopod and stood by its side, his hands resting behind him on its lid top. He considered the possible outcomes, and they did not seem good.

Meanwhile, Renjou and Coco were trying their best to send them a message somehow, but to no avail; the line remained dead. Bailey sat on the windowsill, mopping her head with short, elegant movements of her black paw. She was smiling.

"Why did you do it, Lucky? I asked you to wait outside!"

"How did I know?" Lucky retorted.

"That's exactly why I asked you!" Leon cried. "Now we're stuck here."

"It's not too bad," Lucky said, pacing around: her bubble had now shrunk to the size of a party balloon, but for some reason, Leon's remained about the same.

"You're shrinking," observed Leon.

"Well duh. What do you want me to do about it?"

Leon's Bubble Man shook his head. "I should've told Renjou."

"You didn't?"

"No, I thought you did."

"No! Oh my God, Leon." Lucky's bubble wavered miserably on the floor, drifting around his ankles; bubbles were more attractive when they were smaller, and tended to cling to larger ones by default. Leon finally caught and picked up the elusive little bubble and put it up on his shoulder, where it was constantly trying fuse to his ear, tickling him. He gently brushed it back.

"Ridiculous," it said, in a quiet helium voice, and grew slightly smaller. "What'll happen if I shrink away?"

"Nothing," Leon replied. "You'll be automatically pulled out."

"And you?"

He shrugged, causing Lucky to slide down his shoulder.

"Leon!" the voice cried, now almost inaudibly, and Leon turned about and began to search for Lucky on the floor of the room.

"Come to me, Lucky - I can't see you... What did you say?"

"I'll try to get help," the invisible Lucky said in a voice so quiet Leon had to crane his head to the floor to hear it.

When he was left alone in Nina's room, Leon began to recall his dreams about it, looking for a possible clue in them for an exit. As far as he could remember, the room had a cracked ceiling, and he looked up: there it was.

It didn't look, however, like an exit. He began to study the locked surface panel of the cryopod. He brushed back some of the dust and tried to pull it back, but it was securely shut. He then walked over to the green lamp and pulled it off its stem. He carried it back to the cryochamber, his bubble filled with a cheerful, teal-green light. He placed it on the polished mirror of the locked panel and began to study the mechanism of the lock.It was pretty simple, but he would need tools to open it. He had none. Several times, he tried to rotate the solid looking dial of the panel, but, of course, it remained fixed without a proper code. Exhausted, he leaned back against the chamber and pulled himself up on it. He tried the line again, for the hundredth time, but all was silent.Perched atop the ancient cryopod, the Bubble Man waited for help.

IN THE WOODS

None seemed to be coming, however. Leon's bubble head was nodding tiredly on his chest.

Then he heard a sound: it was Renjou, and he was trying to break in, wiggling his fingers in the entrance, but the door remained shut. In a few minutes, Leon thought that he saw something poking through the gate, but it denied Renjou, and he was bounced out several times before it cut him some slack. He poked in his head and surveyed Leon sitting on the cryopod. For some reason, Renjou's face was grinning, but fortunately, Leon could not see him.

"Leon?" he heard Renjou's voice say.

"Renjou, I'm here!" Leon cried, and flew right smack up to the door: Leon's simulacrum had jumped off the cryopod so suddenly that the inertia made him crash into the gate: Renjou suppressed an anticipated yelp and whisked his head out just before the hit, swearing even as he did so. Several minutes and pull in attempts later, his curly dark head popped again into the room. He brought in his arms next, and then his long set of legs, and climbed into the room through the door like a fuzzy black centipede. The Muffet still could not see him. Otherwise, she would have probably jumped on top of the cryo-unit, screaming, possibly.

"You all right?" the invisible Renjou asked, pacing near Leon. He was grinning and scratching his wicked face with his hand.

"Yeah, but I can't get out," Leon replied, directing his attention to the door. "Do you think you can help?"

"I'm getting bounced out. What's inside the room?" Renjou inquired, apparently, through the door.

"Nothing much," Leon said. He thought that he heard Renjou swearing faintly on the other side.

"Describe what you see exactly; give me the details, everything you see, one by one. Go."

"Nina's empty cryo right in the center, has orange-green dial cones, or shells, about five to twelve; green torchiere - not sure about the brand, I think it's a Lumos or something, let me check - yes. Brown floral wallpa..."

"What about the cryopod? Is it locked?"

"Yes."

"Try licking it."

"What for?"

"Just do it."

"Which part?"

"Any part, just tell me the flavor."

Leon was at a loss, but obeyed the odd request. He ran his fingers along the top lid of the cryopod and tasted the dry, unpleasant residue of centuries old dust.

"Leon? What's it taste like?""Like dust," Leon replied, spitting it out.

This seemed to please Renjou. "Good. Now look under the bottom panel on the floor."

"What about it?"

"If it's green, you can get out by lying inside it."

"I can't even open it, Renjou. It's not big enough, anyway..."

"Goddamnit Leon, is it green or not?"

"Yes."

"Now get inside," Renjou said, and the round locks began to spin, dialing the correct gate code. Soon they opened, and the lid raised itself slowly on its pneumatic rings. Leon peered indecisively inside.

"Get in," Renjou said. "I'll pull you out."

Leon climbed into it carefully, trying to imagine that this was just a bathtub, or a really, really bad dream.

"Relax, man," he heard Coco's voice say, drowning in and out of the ice. "You're just going back to the db. She's your mother," he whispered. "She contains...everything."

In a few moments, he emerged on the other side.Although Nina was missing from the cryopod, they had found their first clue.

As soon as Renjou pulled him out, Leon ran over to the break room and got some coffee to clear away the taste.

"Why'd you make me taste it?" he asked, returning with his coffee mug. "That was disgusting."

"I was just testing your trust," Renjou said, still laughing.

"What was that for?"

Renjou abruptly stopped laughing and his face adopted a morosely serious expression. He got off the windowsill, letting go of Bailey, who slipped down with displeasure like a long sock, and walked over to Leon, who by this time had seated himself again in his chair.

Renjou placed one hand on the armrest and pointed his finger to his chest, looming over him. It seemed as if he were about to zap him, and Leon closed his eyes, but nothing happened. Instead, when he opened them again, he saw two black pieces looking intently into him. Leon wanted to very much, but he couldn't look away.

"Next time I'm telling you to pull out, pull out. Never argue with me," Renjou said, grazing him. "It's just 'Yes, Sir' or 'No, Sir' here, understand?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Mari replied for Leon from her soft chair, without opening her eyes.

He snapped Leon sharply on the shoulder. The Nelcro plate resounded with a dull, quiet thud.Renjou scanned Leon.

Leon was looking at the floor, biting his lip. He did not dare raise his eyes.

"That's what I thought," Renjou said with a narrow grin.

"The dust is what's important," Coco observed, still looking for his black case.

"That's exactly what I thought, Coco," Renjou replied. "You've just read my fucking mind." He then looked over at Lucky in the adjacent chair. She quickly averted her eyes, frowning, and reached for her aviators. She pulled on the dark magentas and resumed looking through the graphs.Leon looked at them once, and dropped his gaze.

"You know, dust is important," Renjou said, taking out Coco's crack case from his pocket. Coco yelped and reached for it, but it was too late: it had already floated up to the ceiling of the room.

"Renjou, you son of a bitch! I need it now, bring it back!" Coco jumped up and down, trying to reach the container, but the dust box remained in place, turning occasionally to tempt him.

She looked at Coco, floating just below the ceiling. She was made of stars. She began massaging her breasts, out of which poured pure white milk. It ran out in glistening white rivers over the Star Lady's black body as Coco kept reaching for her from the floor. She winked at him, turning, and full of many winks.

"Coco le fou!" he cried, trying to get up. He could almost touch her, but she drifted away again, shifting suddenly to the side. "Tricky Lady!" he cried, rubbing his eyes.

"You don't enjoy it as much when it's just lying around, anyway," Renjou observed, and let the case fall down.

Coco spun around; the box had dropped to the floor without scattering its contents. He reached for it, but Renjou stepped on his hand.

"Come to me sometime," Renjou said, and took his foot off the pale, crackling fingers. Coco withdrew his hand, but immediately reached for his case again on reflex. Renjou guffawed, and let him take it back.

"Fuck you," Coco said, sitting cross-legged on the floor. He was trying to open the black box, but it remained hermetically shut. He turned and turned it in his hands like a skillful monkey, and even attempted to bite it, but it was useless.

"Merde!" he swore, sitting in the middle of the Foundry.

"I want some gum," Renjou said, and went out.

He was followed shortly by Coco, who by this time really needed his crack case back.

"I'm going," he said nonchalantly. "If you need a pull out, just call me. I'll be around."

NINA

They found Nina in a completely unexpected place, and way. They weren't looking for her when they saw her wandering through an empty hallway. In her arms, she carried Bailey's caterpillar cat. She stopped when she saw them and looked around, as if expecting someone, but no one appeared. She took a few steps toward them, but then turned to walk away.

"Nina!" Coco called her, and the girl stopped and looked over her shoulder. The long black tail of the caterpillar was wrapped doubly around her arm.

"Nina, we're your friends," Coco said, unconsciously stressing what little remained of his accent, as it had sometimes worked in his favor in the past. "We've come to help you, Nina. Come to us." He made a gentle arcing wave with his hand, and the rest of the Bubbles followed his example, but Nina just turned away. She walked a bit further down the hallway. The Bubbles of the Founders, four in all, watched her drift away. They waited for Renjou's advice.

"Renjou," Leon said to his transmitter, "what should we do now?"

There was some delay on Renjou's part. After a little while, his voice came back. "Follow her," he said. "But don't go into any of the doors in case she goes in, you got that?"

"Yes, sir," Leon replied, with a slight mock in his tone, but only a mock.

Nina had a veritable following now composed of three Bubble Men and one Bubble Woman: they trailed after her through the hallways, keeping at a safe distance attempting not to scare her away. She did not respond to any of them when they called her, except Coco, and only very rarely. When he called her name, Nina would sometimes stop and curiously turn her head in his direction, but she remained completely mute and refused to come near them.

Nina stopped at one of the doors - it was hard to say which hallway it was, and after which junction, but Renjou was keeping track for them now back at the Foundry, so they could continue on their way. It was easier that way, without being slowed down by sending tacks - besides, they did not know if they were being watched through this area, so sending out a location tracker could be dangerous and attract the sentries. They had already encountered several Shadows, but they didn't seem to notice them.

Nina paused at the door, touching it with her hand, but it remained shut. She kept walking down the hallway.

Suddenly, the black caterpillar cat leaned precariously out of her arms, and one end of it dropped like a slinky to the floor. The door they had just passed had opened, and the caterpillar was heading for it.

"Bailey!" Nina cried, and for the first time, the Founders heard her voice. It was the regular voice of a young girl. It seemed to have a soft accent, but they couldn't tell what it was. Coco kept reminding himself that this was not a real girl, as his Bubble Man was developing an unbecoming bubble the more he looked at her in the murky hallway. Mari noticed and ran her hand over him, but it didn't help much.

The girl ran after the cat, which was jumping away like a supernaturally fast slinky down the hallway. It neared the open door, which suddenly emitted reddish light. It leapt inside, and the door shut before Nina could reach it. Nina stood by it for a while, looking down at the floor. She was waiting, but there was no response. She brushed her hand down the door's dial gate, as if saying goodbye, and turned away from it. She seemed to be very sad and occasionally brought her transparent shimmering hands to her face. Coco correctly assumed that she was crying.

"Ma chèrie," he called her. "Don't be sad. We can always find another cat," he said, and Nina looked at him with intense attention in her dark eyes. She began to walk toward him, and then stopped. She was not so close that he could see her expression or features, and her face wavered a bit in the dim light, just like all of their faces in this place. She was a slender girl, of about fourteen or fifteen, with jet-black, shoulder length hair and a fringe that covered her forehead. Even from their distance in the hallway, he thought she was a very pretty girl.Coco smiled, trying to push the expression on his lagging simulacrum, and she seemed to smile back at him. He walked a bit toward her and stopped at some distance to survey her face. Nina stayed where she was, looking at the floor.

"Nina," he called her, and she raised her head. "You should come with us sometime. We'll get you a new cat."

"I don't want to go back there," she said flawlessly in Coco's native tongue - the almost forgotten Traditional French. She spoke it fluently, without any accent. Coco smiled a genuinely broad smile, and her simulacrum beamed back.

"To go back where, sweetheart?" he asked her in the same language and tone.

The rest of the Bubble people and Renjou were confused. They had no idea what they were talking about. For some reason, when Coco was around Nina, Renjou could not see him on the monitor, and Coco knew that.

"To the small room," replied Nina. "I feel bad there."

"You don't have to go back, Nina," Coco said. "But you should come with us." He crouched down on the floor in an attempt to look less intimidating - it had worked previously with Bailey, and he decided to give it a try.

It worked, and Nina stepped slightly closer to him, moving warily and constantly looking around. Coco opened his arms and nearly tumbled backward, as his legs were giving way under him from crouching for so long on the floor. He steadied himself, balancing on his long white fingers. Nina watched him with interest.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked her, and Nina shook her head. "I'm Coco, Coco the Clown," he said, balancing on his arms. "I don't have any tricks to show you now, but if you come with me, we have plenty of toys back at the Foundry. It is a very magical place."

Coco realized that he was stretching things a bit here, but he continued: "I want to give you a little present. It's a little black cat; we call her Bailey, back at the Foundry." He stressed the words each time he spoke them, trying to gage her reaction. Nina's face remained fairly nondescript. Shyly, she brushed her black hair away from her face with her transparent, flickering hand.

"Wouldn't you like a cat, Nina?" he asked her.

Nina shook her head.

"Pourquoi pas?

"I already have a cat," she said, looking more closely into Coco's long face.

They led Nina down the hallway to Junction 987. Coco walked in front of them with the girl while they kept back, as the two were still talking. They were holding hands.They approached the room they called Nina's and the door instantly dialed itself shut.

"Merde!" Coco cried, springing back; it had zapped his hand just as he reached inside the panel."What's happening?" Renjou asked. He could not see most of them by now, and was beginning to get worried. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Leon, whose bubble wavered, flickering, but remained visible.

"The door just shut," Coco replied.

"Did you touch it?" Renjou asked.

"Not yet."

Renjou said something unintelligible on his end of the line. "Step away from the door," he said, suddenly adopting Coco's accent. Coco shrugged his shoulders and stepped back. Renjou dialed the code for him, and the gate snapped open, revealing the small, cold room that housed the empty cryopod.

Nina didn't want to go at first and tried to fight them off, but Coco kissed her on the mouth, after which she fell back and stopped swinging her fists. He cradled her down into the cold chamber, all the while talking to her and not losing track of her eyes. Mari helped Nina inside the cryopod. She was singing a soft tune, and soon Nina relaxed and seemed to go to sleep.

He placed one chaste kiss on the white surface of her forehead, and began closing the cryopod's pneumatic lid. Her eyes suddenly opened and she looked straight at him. Coco smiled and patted her gently on the wrist.

"It's going to be all right, Bon Bon. Just close your eyes now, and Mari will sing you away." He smiled, and nodded to Mari.

Mari began singing softly. She had a beautiful voice and a good range. At last, Nina seemed to relax a bit more. She stole one last sly look at Coco's face and went to sleep. Coco looked over at Mari: she looked away, clenching something in her fist as if there were a talisman there.

"Renjou, pull us out now," she said, and in a few seconds, her form vanished from Nina's room. Coco opened his eyes, but he was still inside the Temple.

"Merde," he said.

He tried to reach Renjou and Mari, but the line was dead. Nina was sleeping on her side in the glass cryopod. She had one arm under her head, and her lips were slightly parted.

"Speedy?" he heard Renjou's abrasive voice say.

"Yes?"

"What are you doing?"

"I'm waiting for you to pull us out," Coco replied, scratching his Bubble Man's long, wavy nose with one hand. It rippled and went back to its original shape.

"Why didn't you pull out with Mari? I need you to go back now," Renjou said. "Try the bottom of the cryo, if nothing else works - I can't see either of you now."

"It's not working, Renjou."

"Then try threading with her," Renjou advised.

"Me? Pourquoi? You always say I just fuck things up."

"She doesn't trust anyone except you," Renjou replied. "I wonder why," he added a trifle grimly.

"I don't even know how to do it," Coco began, when the line suddenly snapped shut, popping unpleasantly in his ears. Coco waited.

"Allo? Anybody there?"

After a while, he returned to the cryopod and sat down by her side in a white plastic chair that had recently appeared in Nina's room. He sat for a while, childishly dangling his legs. Nina seemed to be fast asleep, but he saw her looking slyly at him from her dark eye slits.

Coco stood up. He tried to control himself, but he couldn't. They awoke together on the Foundry's floor.

Mari stepped back.

"That's not what I meant when I said try threading," Renjou noted. "But at least, we've got the girl." He pulled on his hat. "Pressing business," he said on his way to the exit.

TEMPLE

The Temple that stood on the mountain was a very large former airbase, and the data blocks were kept inside the multiple airship hangars under sloping, well-protected roofs. It was cooled by at least forty-five towers, which the Founders discovered by chance: they looked like highway reflector dots on the floor of the hallway that branched into different directions just before King's Hall. Chi-Chi had stepped on one entirely by accident, and Renjou's peevish voice exclaimed suddenly in his head:

"Chi-Chi!" he cried, like a monkey. "Chi-Chi!"

Chi-Chi was sure that he'd made some kind of mistake, and shrank into himself, expecting an immediate pull back, but nothing happened.Renjou beamed. "Chi-Chi, step on another one," he requested.

"Why?" Chi-Chi inquired.

"You fat bastard, just do it. What does it take you to step on a dot?"

Chi-Chi rubbed his head. He was still undecided. "Renjou, which one should I step on?" he asked the boss, who groaned in response like a morbid cartoon character.

"Any which one you see - you stamp it out. There are fifteen big ones and at least thirty small ones - and then some - your pick. When you return, I'm going to kiss your fat ass." Renjou's voice sounded unusually sunny. "I just bought some fresh donuts," he added teasingly with a smile.

Chi-Chi was tempted, although he shuddered at the first prospect, and began stomping out the reflector dots. It took him a whole hour, after which he was exhausted and plaintively called for a pull back, but no response came.

Back on the Mountain, the explosions went off like popcorn, and several of the larger towers cracked open, spilling out their black liquid contents onto the hangar's roof and upper decks, but the snake-like water chutes immediately sucked it up.

Chi-Chi was left alone in the hallway: he didn't want to come back yet, as he had lost count of the dots, and was now mentally retracing himself back to the origin. He tried to confirm with Renjou, but the line was oddly still and full of scratchy, whispering sounds.

Something rose from the floor ahead of him: it was a perfectly rectangular, black shape that began moving toward him, growing bigger and bigger as it approached. Its square polished face was blocking the hallway, and it seemed to be rotating jaggedly as it moved. Chi-Chi called home, but the light was dead.

Renjou resuscitated him on the Foundry's floor.

COPYCATS

"Which Bailey do you like, Nina?" Mari asked her. They were standing in the small, sunlit room at the very back of the Foundry. They called it Baby's Room, now that Nina was temporarily living in it.

Nina looked at the two Baileys seated on the floor right before her. She looked at one, then the other. Neither was wearing a collar or any other identification.

Nina looked again from one Bailey to the other Bailey and closed her eyes. She furrowed her white brow, trying to determine which one was the real cat. Then she stuck out her finger at the one on the right. "That one!" she cried in her native tongue, and picked her up. Bailey purred mysteriously, trying to climb back down again to the pink and blue-checkered floor. Earlier, they decided to find out which one she would pick by conducting a double blind study. Only Leon knew its results, and he wouldn't tell Renjou anything about them afterwards, just in case.

Mari laid Nina down into a very large crib, which was pink and painted with blue star-like flowers. It had been skillfully disguised by Coco to look like a baby's crib, only for a very big baby. He did his best in painting and decorating the pod, so that by the time he was done, it looked nothing like a cryochamber. Mari approved his efforts by giving him a small kiss on the cheek, then neck. He gently petted her ass, but withdrew his hand. Mari noticed that he was wearing a black glove on it for some reason.

"How long will she be asleep?" Leon asked, when the Larouxes had returned to the main room.

"Just a few weeks," replied Mari, "until New Year's." She brushed her light auburn hair away with one hand. "She's all clean, though. I'm beginning to think they're hiding Dabel inside another database."

"What will happen to her?" Lucky asked.\

"We'll send her back to her time, that's all," Mari said. "Once we figure out what it is for sure." She gave Lucky a strange, almost apologetic look. "But she's not connected with Dabel in any way, or even threaded with the Temple."

Renjou turned away from them and walked toward the window. He stood looking out of it, but judging by the squarely raised shoulders, he wasn't really looking at anything in the street below. Chances were, Renjou was busy preparing another one of his derisive monologues. Bailey - one of them, anyway - jumped up on the windowsill and began cleaning her face. She squinted her big blue eyes pleasurably and, from time to time, purred quietly to herself.

"Maybe we're doing this all wrong," Lucky began, and Renjou preemptively flicked one shoulder, like a crow refolding its wing. "We're doing the same things over and over, and it doesn't lead to anything."

"You have a better idea?" Renjou asked, without turning. Absently, he reached down and attempted to scratch Bailey's head, but she avoided him and repositioned herself further on the windowsill.

"I didn't say it was a better idea, but nothing you have come up with so far is working." Lucky was sick of everything by now, including, and perhaps especially, the abrasive Renjou. She was ready for a good fight. Renjou turned away from the window and walked a little further into the room.

"If we could somehow track it," Lucky continued, "things would be different. This is just so incredibly random! It's like trying to find a microchip in a recycling bin. It's just impossible!"

"We do have an ID," retorted Renjou. "But apparently, none of you are sharp enough to trace it."

That last particular statement caused a storm. It took place entirely inside the little room, but were it not for the insulated panels of the window, it would most likely be audible outside. It began, naturally enough, at Renjou's magnetic epicenter, but soon expanded and evolved elaborately to include all of the available forces at its disposal: Lucky, Leon, Coco, Mari, and even the mild-mannered, usually calm Chi-Chi, who had wandered by accident into the room.

They had finally let go of all their frustrations and irritation with each other that had been slowly accumulating over the last two months in this room.

In a few minutes, Lucky was shouting at Renjou and Leon, who were getting close to a less-than-virtual spat among themselves, while Mari and Coco were going at each other. Only Kirby and Curly did not participate in the storm: as usual, they were out, listening to music in the void.

"Calm down!" Renjou yelled, covering everyone's voices, and they gradually fell silent. The storm had almost exhausted itself. "Calm down," he repeated. "Jeez! It's like a nuthouse in here." He briefly eyed Bailey, who was calmly cleaning her face with one paw on the windowsill. Suddenly, Bailey raised her head.

"This is ridiculous!" Leon said. "Lucky's right. We're never going to find it randomly this way."

"Shut the hell up!" Renjou snapped. He hated the word "randomly" by now. Renjou was about to say something else, but suddenly adopted a strangely absent expression and his mean mouth closed by itself. He was staring at something across the room with clearly insane eyes. Lucky and Leon turned around.

She was standing a little distance away from the empty bookcase. She seemed upset by all the arguing and shouting, and was eyeing them with some concern from beneath her black fringe.Renjou rubbed his eyes.

"What the hell is this?" he inquired.

"What?" Leon and Lucky said simultaneously, looking in the direction of Renjou's frozen gaze.

Coco was drowning in laughter. He waved his hand, and the mirage drifted away.

Renjou drew a long face. He stared at Coco for a full minute, but it had no effect. "You sick bastard," he said, ruffled. "Go back to the can."

SAL

"She's all clean," Renjou said, pacing about Sal's house. Sal had just returned with Sam, and their efforts to track down Dabel were proving futile. Earlier that day, they had rummaged through Nina's memory with Lucky's help, but to no avail. Nina contained no trace of the virus. The only useful, and exact, piece of information they'd managed to retrieve was that she first appeared in 4270, and had fallen into a coma-like sleep at the age of fifteen, which coincided with the end of the meltdown caused by Dabel. Dating the model, however, revealed Nina to be an ALLIS, circa 5097 - an almost exact replica of Lucky, with one exception: Nina's system memory was not nearly as big. Otherwise, the similarities were uncanny.

Renjou's Bubble Man paused its perambulation and turned to the host. "Sal, why did you send us after Nina in the first place?"Sal shrugged, wavering, which added a certain indecisiveness to his answer. "Well, as long as we still have access to the Temple, we can find Dabel, supposing..."

"Where?" Renjou interrupted.

Sal shrugged again. "It's the only place they could store him - the only place big enough, anyway."

"Have you tried threading back the cryopod itself?" Sam asked.

Renjou shook his head. "No. It doesn't contain anything. We've already got the girl out - why don't you just blow it all up?"

"What? The Temple?" Sal's bubble face suddenly adopted a comically menacing expression, due mostly to the poorly defined simulacrum.

"Renjou, before you blow anything up, you have to know what's in it. That place might contain Dabel, or it could contain a dozen other Ninas, or Baileys, and God knows what else. Besides, there's no way I can just blow it all up. It's too big for that." Sal paused for emphasis. "They were using her as a memory bank in 4285, I can tell you that for certain. That means they either haven't got around to her yet, or are storing it somewhere inside the Temple. I need you to scout it out."

"You want to save Dabel, don't you, Sal?"

"Why would I?" Sal asked, surprised.

"No reason," Renjou answered, "but you have to be pretty damn confident to keep on looking."

"It's an extreme measure," Sam intervened. "In case it doesn't work out, we could at least use the Temple as our last-ditch backup. It's not the best solution, of course, but our choices are limited."

THE SHADOWMEN

"This way," Renjou directed them. His voice could be surprisingly reassuring in times of trouble, but once the trouble was over it usually spilled out into a seemingly endless, jarring barrage.

"Why?" Leon asked.

"That's the wrong way," said Lucky.

"Goddamnit, are you going to listen to me or not?" Renjou began pacing the floor. "Go to your left. Now. I see them coming."

"Renjou, that's the exit!" Leon said."Go to your left now. They're coming."Lucky and Leon exchanged a brief, consultative look.

"It's an exit," Lucky insisted, peering into the wobbling dark hallway. The hallway directly behind them was gradually filling with shadowy distorted shapes. It resembled an overcrowded train on the subway, except that the figures were constantly changing their size.

"I'm telling you, it's not an exit. Goddamnit!" Renjou was running around the small room back at the Foundry. He paused for a moment and looked over at Bailey sunning herself on the windowsill. She unabashedly extended her leg and began grooming her nethers. "And if you wait here any longer, you'll definitely be thrown out," he said, using his deepest baritone for emphasis.

Leon and Lucky ran further down the dark hallway, pulling on all the doors, but none of them opened. The Shadows at the junction ahead had already detected them, and a small group of dark figures was blocking the exit to this floor. For some reason, however, they did not move forward.

"What are they doing?" Renjou asked.

"Nothing," Leon replied. "It looks like they're afraid. Or stuck."

"Coco?" Renjou called.

"Nothing doing, Madame," Coco replied, "but if you think we should pull back now..."

"No."

Leon scratched his Bubble Man's head. "What should we do?" he asked Renjou.

"Try them."

"They're blocking the hallway," Coco put in.

"See how strong they are," was Renjou's response, and the line went out.

Coco, Lucky, Leon, and Mari exchanged a look, while Curly and Kirby's Bubble Twins jointly shook their heads in disapproval.

Coco and Leon moved ahead to try the Shadows, but the Shadows quickly scattered them.These guardians were mostly cowards - there were many of them, but individually, they were very weak. Most of them refused to fight openly, but instead pounced upon and surrounded the intruders like white blood cells, suffocating them under the multiple weights of their greasy, rustling shells. The Founders fought them off together, but it was getting considerably harder to move through the Temple's gates. For some reason, the guards suddenly began protecting the Dead End, even though it led nowhere, for all it appeared.

Coco was slow after the attack. They had damaged his shell, and it had shrunk down considerably around him. It took him three or four really quick, small steps to cover the same distance as the others, and he was lagging behind constantly while Mari and the rest of the Bubble figures moved ahead.

He stopped at one point and leaned tiredly against the wall. Mari paused in the hallway."Victor, are you all right?" she asked."Yes, keep going, Mari, I'll catch up in a minute."Mari waited. He waved her away, and she finally turned to go: her help was needed at the next gate.

Coco's hand brushed the wall in a circular motion, tripping an invisible string. He was surprised at this movement, as if he didn't quite control it. Something was ticking quietly inside this wall, and he leaned against it, listening to its hidden heartbeat. He did not know what to make of it. Something was dragging him down here with the heaviness of sleep. He leaned fully on the wall and slid down to the floor against it. He could still see Mari's shimmering pale figure at the far end of the corridor. She looked a bit like a ghost, he thought to himself. She was working on opening the gate, while the Bubble Twins and Lucky and Leon watched the hallways for any unwelcome visitors.

Coco looked down at the floor, meditatively scratching his neck. In a short while, he felt ready to go again, but to his horror, he noticed short, colorful threads emerging from the walls and floor all around him. They popped up like bits of dough coming through a strainer and started crawling toward him, opening their ends preemptively into tattered rope cords: they especially seemed to be attracted to Coco's left hand. He immediately raised it off the floor, and the strings raised themselves in unison like an obedient orchestra. A few of the strings jumped up at him, trying to get a good bite. One of them almost got under his Bubble Man's skin, but he pulled it away from him.

The strings were coming in now by the hundreds. It was a swarm.

"No!" he cried, trying to fight them off. "Help me! Mari!"

In a few seconds, the small colorful node clusters surrounded Coco and began to thread.Mari ran back down the hallway.

"Victor!" she called him. "Victor, where are you?"

She ran further ahead, trying not to step on any of the threads. It was much harder to move in reverse and it took her a while to find him. At last, she spotted Coco in a colorful mess on the floor.Coco was quickly revived at the Foundry. He awoke in the arms of Mari and looked around him as if he did not know the place.

"Renjou, pull us out now," Leon said, but, when he looked around, there was no Lucky. The hallway began to wobble and bend all around him, and he could already feel the invisible tug of Renjou's hand. "Shit! Renjou, wait!" he shouted. "Wait! Lucky's gone, I'll be right back."

"It looks like she got in through one of the doors," Renjou responded. "She said she doesn't know which one, it could be a trap. Hurry up now, in-coming."

Leon ran back down the hallway, calling Lucky and pulling on all the doors. A dark shape rose from the floor at the distant end of the corridor and began to move toward him. It tore through the Bubble Twins in an instant, and they separated and shrank away on the floor like a pair of frying eggs.

"Leon, get back here!" Mari called him.

"Lucky!" he rattled at the doors, but they remained stubbornly shut. He turned around: someone was coming.

She came from the darkness. She had pale golden hair but otherwise looked just like her. The slender simulacrum wavered in the dark hallway, shimmering, moving with unmistakable grace. The girl leaned suddenly on the wall, holding onto her neck with both hands. Something was very wrong.

"Lucky!" he called her, running.

A Shadow was approaching her. It clambered greasily onto Lucky's collapsed shape, and began draining out her shell.

He threw off the Shadowman, who rebounded and hit him back with the indeterminate dripping scrawl of its fist. Leon shrank to half his size, ducking the second swing. The Shadowman was growing slower, however, and Leon caught a moment and landed a few well-directed hits. The Shadowman only grew bigger each time Leon struck him: soon he grew so big he filled the entire hallway from ceiling to floor. The Shadowman raised his arms and seemed ready to attack again, then suddenly dropped through the floor as if there were a trap door underneath him.

"Lucky, what's wrong?" he asked, holding her clumsily in the arms of his Bubble Man. She was very weak and couldn't speak. He struggled to keep them both from falling down. "Hang on, Lucky, hang on. Renjou! Pull out!"

She opened her eyes. "I love you, Leon," she said, and ran her hand along his face.

"Are you al..."

Leon held her hand back, but she was very forceful. Soon she had both her hands around his neck and was attempting to strangle him. He threw her off, and she withdrew again into the murmuring shadows, swallowed by the wall. He put his hand against it. It was freezing cold and wet. He moved a bit further, and then heard the wall coming to life again.

A massive dark shape was emerging.

"On your left!" he heard Renjou's voice say.A door suddenly opened to his left, and Leon ran inside. The door instantly snapped shut behind him. In the dark, Leon heard someone's footsteps.

"Lucky?" He touched the door, trying to feel who was outside, but he couldn't tell.

THE BUBBLE MAN

The lone Shadow approached Leon's door. It raised its hand, dripping long strings of tar, and put one finger like a key inside the keyhole. The door came open, and Leon shrank back, but the Shadow did not proceed any further: instead, it stood for a long while on the doorstep, looking at him, as if evaluating him. Finally, it seemed to reach some kind of decision and silently stepped inside. The Shadow seemed to be smiling. Eerily, its poorly defined face seemed to resemble Dr. Jurgen's. Leon backed away further into the room and called Renjou, but the line was out. The Shadow raised its heavy dripping arms, blocking the doorway. It seemed to be calling for back up now that Leon was in a trap.

Suddenly, a soap Bubble Man appeared behind it and hit the Shadow squarely over the head. It grunted very realistically and spun around. The Bubble Man managed to land a few more hits to its face and middle before the Shadow swung out its dripping arms, causing the Bubble Man to waver and shrink. It grabbed the dwindling soap bubble puppet like a gorilla and began to pound it crudely on the head. Leon ran out and forked the Shadow, after which it let go of the Bubble Man, who was so small now he was only about three or four feet tall off the floor.

"Come on!" the Bubble Man said in Renjou's deep voice, which sounded almost comically out of character.

"Where's Lucky?" Leon asked.

"This way," Renjou motioned, as Leon ducked another blow and ran past the guard.

The small Bubble Man was waiting ahead in the dark hallway, bobbing gently up and down.

"I think she went this way," he said, "but we have no time to find her now. Let's go. Come on, Leon."

"I'll find her," Leon said, and ran past the Bubble Man, who wavered and rose like smoke to the ceiling of the hallway.

"Come back," Renjou's voice called, now almost completely extinguished.

DEAD END

"Leon, where are you?" Lucky looked around: Leon had suddenly disappeared, as if he had gone right through the floor.

"I'm in a small room," Leon's voice replied. He sounded strange, but Lucky decided it was probably just a static barrier. The walls of the hallway around her were trembling like walls of water about to collapse. She wondered if that could actually happen, and tried to keep moving ahead. She was alone here, and no one except Leon replied to her calls for help.

"But where are you?" she asked him.

"I don't know."

"Are you all right?

"Yeah."

"What's it like in there?"

"It's dark."

"Can you take me to you?"

"I think so," the stranger said, and in a moment, everything stopped moving and became still and dark.

Lucky could see absolutely nothing at all here, but gradually her eyes discerned a hazy green glow, like that coming from a foggy street lamp. She was inside a small room. It was dark here and felt oddly empty, as if it had stood unused for a very long time. She heard someone's footsteps nearby.

"Leon, are you here?"There was no response. The green sphere of light in the corner began to slowly expand and pulsate, and soon the whole room was bathed in its greenish light.

Lucky could now see a cryochamber, which stood in the center of the room. She approached it and peered inside. It was empty, and the frozen petals of its mouth were tightly shut.

"Leon, where are you?" she called, looking around warily. It was an unusually small room - the ceiling was only about two feet away. Lucky hated close spaces. She knew that in about a minute, she would begin to panic, but she tried to keep her fear at bay. She returned to the door. It was jammed shut. "Leon!" she called, trying to dial it. She hit it a few times with her shoulder, although it was useless.

The small green light suddenly went out and left Lucky completely in the dark. An unpleasant rustling sound began to rise all around her, as if she were in an alley of crackling dead trees. "Leon!" she called again, but there was no reply.She looked at the floor: it was melting right under her feet. "Help me!" Lucky cried out, sinking beneath it.

When Lucky emerged on the other side of the rustling black gate, she was surprised to find herself back with Renjou and Leon. She immediately threw off her cap and quickly snapped off the finger cusps. She looked over at Leon: he was still out.

Leon looked around: Lucky was gone without a trace.

"Leon, come back!" he heard Renjou shout. A wave of buzzing static was drowning the line out in sharp jagged bits. "I can't stay here any longer; I'm going to pull out! Coco is coming your way. Come back now to the junction! Do you hear me? Come back, Leon!"

Leon kept running.

He stopped before a junction of five hallways \- he did not know which one it was, as he had long ago lost track of the numbers.

"Lucky?" Leon peered around the corner: the next hallway was silent. He turned back.He took the hallway to the left, and as he walked along it, testing all the doors mechanically, the hallway's only open end became blocked by a curtain of rippling black. Leon stopped. From here, there was no way out. This was the one-way passage they had avoided so many times: the Dead End.

The rippling black curtain began to glide toward him. It was a polished, solid wall that reflected him, and he could see his reflection approach him even though it was quite dark. He ran back, although he knew that the hallway ended with a blockade, but he couldn't help himself.Before he neared the sealed wall, he stopped and called Lucky and Renjou one last time. The line remained patiently still. He tried to break the approaching curtain, but the solid block of its face jolted him back on contact. The reflection crawled toward him and reached out to hit him with its fist. Leon fell back from the second zap. He was already at the wall.

The curtain moved closer and covered him, and he began to suffocate under its weight. Leon thought that he heard fireworks going off somewhere, but that was the pressure on his eardrum plates.

"Help me!" he cried, before the curtain took over. It pressed him flat against the wall, compressing him.

Suddenly, the sealed black wall of the Dead End opened with a static crackle. It was Lucky. Her arms wrapped around Leon, and she pulled him toward herself into the other side of the gap. The polished curtain of obsidian drew away, snapping emptily.

He awoke slowly, and the first thing he uttered scared Lucky, because it was the classic telltale sign of a hacking trip gone bad: Leon opened his eyes and looked around him blankly. "Where am I?" he asked.

Gradually, he came to his senses as Lucky coaxed him out of his state. She repeated his name over and over, rubbing his hands between her palms, kissed him and even tickled him, and eventually something seemed to snap.

"What did you see?" she asked him.

"Nothing," Leon replied.

"Do you think you've got anything?" Renjou asked.

Leon shook his head.

"Neither did I," Renjou said, and turned impatiently to Curly: "What have you got?"

"Nothing much," Curly answered. "I just don't get it." He looked over at Kirby; he was still out, his fingers tapping rhythmically to an inaudible beat. "But I think there's another room on the other side of the Dead End."

Renjou shook his head. "Not likely."

"The Dead End's not supposed to lead anywhere at all," Lucky began. "So why was I able to..."

"Hey, you forgot me in here!" Coco yelled humorously, putting his hands together like a loudspeaker to semaphore them back.

"I'm calling for a pullout," Renjou replied.

"So pull out already, what's your problem?"

"Eh, I can't. Something's keeping me back."

His voice sounded distant and echoed. They watched him walk past the Shadows clustered around the disturbed entrance to the Dead End. He strolled about the hallways, pausing before the blocked gate to King's Hall, and then went into Nina's room.

"What are you doing?" Mari exclaimed. She was about to follow Coco, but Renjou held her back.

Coco walked about Nina's room, eyeing its strange new occupant: the formerly vacant chamber now contained a big silver cocoon. It was suspended vertically from the ceiling by a single, shimmering string. The weight of the cocoon had crushed the fragile cryopod, and it lay in pieces beneath the glittering monster.

The Shadows failed to respond to Coco as he approached, even though three of them were standing right next to the remains of the cryochamber. One of them even tried to thread by holding his hand.

"Hands off, buddy," Coco snapped at it, and pulled his arms crosswise to his chest. He approached the cocoon and stood looking at it, craning his neck like a museum patron. His black eyes were scanning its interior. The Shadows murmured intermittently among themselves, shrugging their vague shoulders. "Yoo-hoo, anybody in there?" He knocked lightly on the side of the shell, and pressed one ear to it, listening for movement, but there was no sound.

"What's he doing?" Renjou asked Lucky, as he could not see Coco anymore in his new state."Nothing," Lucky replied. "I think he's getting back."

They looked over at Coco in his hexchair. He was slowly becoming awake.

"What is that?" Renjou asked him.

Coco rubbed his eyes and yawned tiredly. "I think it's Dabel in there," he said. "It looks like he's built himself a new nest."

"Why didn't they attack you?" asked Chi-Chi.

Coco shrugged. "It looks like I made some friends," he said, rubbing his head. "There's a big room on the other side of that Dead End. Like a big hall, or something like that. My head's killing me," he added. "I'll be right back."

They hacked the Dead End again the next day, following Lucky's approach from its other side: there was a very big room there called King's Hall. It was a vast chamber, one of several that branched off the center of the Temple, but it was empty with the exception of the Shadows. They defended it so well it was nearly impossible to get inside. The gate bounced out all of them almost as soon as they entered, even, Coco, who had managed to temporarily confuse the sentries with his songs.

After their encounter with the gate to King's Hall, all of the Founders suddenly developed intense, throbbing headaches that seemed to border on migraines - all of them except Lucky. The rest of the Founders spent the next day moping around the room and nursing their monstrous headaches with various legal and illegal remedies, but they were of little, if any, help. Only Lucky was still on her feet, and she hovered among them, bringing them food, drinks, and their medicine of choice.

"We should be happy we didn't get fried today," Renjou said, looking at them with a disdainful expression. This was a bad day. There would be absolutely no work done, and it was already Friday. "We have only two weeks left," Renjou continued, putting on his dark winter outfit. He pulled one hand through its sleeve, and then paused, his jacket hanging awkwardly beside him. "No matter what happens, I want you to know that I'm proud of you. All of you, even you, Coco." He picked up his hat and placed it on his head. "I hope y'all feel better soon," he said, pulling on the remainder of his coat."We're like an army," Kirby said suddenly from his chair. His eyes were directed at Renjou as he was exiting. Everyone looked at him, even though they were still overtaken by their collective migraine. "We are an army," he said, and Coco gave him a sour look. "And Renjou is our general."

Renjou stopped on his way to the exit and looked over at Kirby - a bit cynically, it seemed, but with a twinkle of humor in his dark eyes.

"I'm in nobody's army," he said, and walked out the door, shutting it securely behind him.

DELTA

"District Five Response Unit," the automated system announced. "Please state your emergency after the tone."

"It's that guy again," Renjou heard someone say over the automatic system.

"Hello, I'd like to report a parking violation," Renjou announced hopelessly into the tone.

"Location, please," the system responded.

"Mason and 62nd, Unit 67-9..."

"Look!" Lucky suddenly cried out. She flew out of her hacker's chair and rushed to the window: Bailey jumped aside, showing her displeasure by flicking her tail as she left the room.

Lucky was staring silently at something that was happening down in the street.

Leon, Mari, Coco, and Renjou soon joined her.

There was some kind of commotion below: there were unusually many police craft, some of which looked as if they belonged to the SRI, and the scene was attracting numerous rubberneckers. Several more police craft arrived, their doors snapping open in unison, but instead of the police, Renjou saw SRI agents. His eyes widened a bit and he peered out further.

They watched.

The agents, twelve of them in all, stepped out of their hovers with Dekos drawn and ready to fire. They were approaching the Foundry building through the back entrance gate. Renjou jumped into Chi-Chi's chair and pulled on his partly burned out, wrinkled cap.

"Renjou, what are you doing?" Leon asked, but Renjou did not seem to hear him. His fingers were moving in an usual pattern: he was scanning the deck.

The agents surrounded the hover, a green Locust.

One of the officers raised his speakers and said, "Open your visor panel, repeat, open your visor panel in 6, 7, 0, Delta 8, 3, 8, 9..."

The officer did not finish, because the opaque cyclopean eye of the Locust suddenly slid open, revealing a circular black gate. Its disc dilated and contracted like a pupil in the orange eye of the machine. The agents fired at it, and it fired back. They were scattered behind their shields like dead, flying leaves of magnolia trees in the autumn. They landed sadly all over the sidewalk, then re-gathered their forces and waited while a drone camera snuck inside the open gate. It was immediately thrown out and landed on the smoking black sidewalk just in front of the officers' feet: it was burned out and peacefully twitched its remaining prickly black legs.The officers consulted the map.

Suddenly, the code read began again, but this time, it was the other way around, "3, 8, atleD, 0, 7... "

The gate did not finish reading its code. The officers immediately pelted it with a Deko round big enough to take out an entire building. The agents waited for the clearing of smoke, then proceeded. One of them broke the hover's gate and it fell in, crumbling into glassy black bits on the front seat. There were only three officers working in the immediate vicinity of the Locust. They were pulling out its disc shaped roof panels, ripping out the machine's innards, and wiring. The curling threads fell all over the roof, sliding down like heavy, crawling paper confetti, but of only one color, black. The greasy smoking drive ruins fell to the sidewalk in strips of bacon, and the local Greyskins began rustling in the nearby garbage chutes, excited by the fresh smell. The remaining SRI agents stood around the Locust in a close circle, holding on to their shields just in case.

Renjou frowned. "Leon, get your head down," he said from his chair.

Leon looked at him, surprised. He crouched down by the long black legs of Lucky, who was too far away to notice his hand climbing up her skirt to reach, ultimately, the double entrance to her nest.

"Renjou," she said, looking at him with absent eyes through the room. "I feel a bugger."

Renjou pelted Leon with a junk memory case. It hit him squarely on the head, and he pulled out his hand from under Lucky's skirt.

"They're done with it now," Renjou said to Lucky. "I'm going to pull you out now, okay?" Renjou walked over to the back of the machine and figuratively depicted a cutthroat to Leon by slicing his own with his finger.

Renjou pricked up his ears: there was a faintly registering sound outside not unlike an alarm. It could have been set off automatically while the hover was being dismantled, but something didn't feel quite right.

One of the officers used a military style zapper to crack open the hatch. It lifted, revealing an empty cabin interior. The officer scanned the Locust's cab, and then climbed inside. She pulled on some switch or lever and opened the rear deck. Two agents lifted up the sunroof by hand and the bottle-green sunscreen panel slid away, revealing the haul deck of the hover. It was loaded with explosives.An ear-splitting city alarm rose soon after that and filled the sky.

IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING

If the database was the Temple on the Mountain, Dabel was certainly its King and he was not an easy one to reach. The gate kept bouncing back everyone before they could enter King's Hall, but, fortunately, Mari, Coco, and Lucky were able to trick it and accomplish the hack. Coco held hands with and otherwise distracted the guardian Shadows on the other side of the Dead End, who seemed to take him for their own, while Lucky and Mari hacked the gate. Mari had to be pulled out immediately after she opened it, but Lucky was safe to enter the room. Coco returned to help her, but as soon as she walked in, it bounced her out, so that only Coco was left. The gate remained open, dilating unpleasantly like an eye, undecided on what to do next. Coco peered cautiously inside, only far enough to immediately pull back. It was a tricky situation, sort of like the precariously jammed doors of an elevator that could instantly snap shut.

There was no reaction, however, and Coco stepped inside. A Centipede followed him shortly, crawling clumsily through the gap. The Centipede and Coco entered King's Hall, bypassing several vacant looking Shadows. At the center of the giant room, they saw a small black box. It was sitting right on the floor and was no bigger than a matchbox. The Centipede tried to open it with one of his sharp, tack-like fingers, but soon fell back, as the box was emitting short, throbbing pulses of sound that, apparently, caused Centipedes to bounce out. The Centipede lay vacant on the floor at Coco's feet, twitching mechanically. Coco called Renjou until he found their frequency again.

"What the fuck just happened?" Coco inquired.

"You'll look into it," Renjou said, grimacing.

Coco looked at the box. It was solid, even to his scanner, but he thought its interior looked familiar. It looked, in fact, a bit like a miniature copy of Nina's room, at the heart of which was the monstrous cocoon of Dabel. He tried to lift it off the floor to carry it back with him, but it was very cold, as well as impossibly heavy. He sat down on the floor and waited for Renjou, but Renjou could not get back. Out of boredom, Coco began drumming on the box with his fingers and humming a tune that did not sound much like anything. (It was a habit with both of the Larouxes by now, who sang sometimes while they worked, possibly to drown out each other.)

Coco stared at the box: it was emitting quiet, plaintive sounds, and the four petals of its mouth slowly began to move open. He stared at it in amazement, but then it stopped moving. He tapped on it again, but it did not respond. Coco looked up, scanning the enormously vast, high ceiling of King's Hall, and then called Renjou.

"Renjou, how long before pull out?" he asked.

"Not long. What's it doing? I heard it moving."

"Eh, I don't know. It just stopped." Coco glanced with suspicion at the box.

"Try singing again," Renjou suggested.

"Why? Did you miss me?"

"I think it was moving because of that."

At first, Coco thought that Renjou was not serious, but he shrugged and began singing again. The box waited, but soon it became unbearable, and it sprouted four legs out of its bottom panel and began to crawl away.

"Where're you going?" Coco exclaimed, and ran after it. The box was quickly clipping away sideward like a small black crab, but Coco caught it up just before it vanished into a dark miniature hallway that resembled the entrance to a mouse's home, except that it was acutely triangular and probably led to another warped giant passageway, one of many on the other side of King's Hall.

Coco flattened himself against the box, lying on top of it, and moderated his singing, so that it stopped twitching after a while. He lay back exhausted and ran his fingers over its edge, testing it. Its petals flew open with a singular, mechanical snap, and the sudden explosion threw Coco back. Like a jack-in-the-box hidden inside the small container, the enormous monster burst out all at once and filled the entire room, squeezing Coco back together with Renjou's emptily dangling simulacrum. The walls of King's Hall trembled under the tremendous pressure as the cocoon expanded, simultaneously breaking the walls around it, and breaking out of its old shell. The soft, silvery coat disintegrated, leaving behind a beautiful, iridescently green, hard chrysalis. It shot out a thread and became suspended from the ceiling of King's Hall. In a few moments, the shell's expansion had stopped, and Coco was pulled out.

BUGS

Chi-Chi loved bugs, but not the elusive digital ones.

Whenever some stray spider, housefly, or other insect wandered inside the Foundry, Chi-Chi was the first man on call. Whenever Mari spotted an insect, usually a disgusting roach, or some small breed of centipede, which seemed to love the Foundry's old tub, she called for Chi-Chi's help. She was simply too disgusted by even the thought of crushing one, and avoided the insects for that reason alone, although she was fully aware of the extent of Chi-Chi's love and would never harm a bug right in front of him.

If, by the time Chi-Chi got there, the intruder could still be located; he would pick it up and carry it for release outside. He had personally requested everyone at the Foundry not to purposely step on or otherwise destroy any insects. It genuinely pained him to see a dead or crushed bug.Thus, when the Founders began collectively referring to Dabel's new form as a "cocoon," he promptly corrected them. He was about to explain the difference between the various stages of development of a typical butterfly, but the Founders politely cut him off.

They were racking their brains now, sometimes quite literally, over what to do with Dabel's new form, which would be more appropriately termed a chrysalis. It was a beautiful and monstrous thing that occupied the vast King's Hall.

It was 4 am.

Kirby was busily washing his hair at the old sink with brief, round movements of his hands. He resembled a grooming mosquito. He used the orange liquid soap as shampoo, for lack of any. Kirby surveyed himself once between the mirror stains, and dried his head with paper towels, pieces of which remained loosely attached to his hair. He ran his hand through it a few times, but they remained in place. It was time to get to work.

It was now 5 am.

Coco was meditatively scratching his arms in front of the bathroom mirror. He took off the black glove and inspected his left hand. As soon as they were free, the colorful strings spilled out like spaghetti, twining and curling around his wrist in search of their pairing partners. He quickly looked around and pulled on the glove again.

They were watching Coco every day now from Sal's house.

"If I were you, I would get rid of that beak-nosed coke-fiend," Saleri said, watching him crane his neck.

"He's a good hacker," replied Renjou. "Besides, I can't kick any of them out now. They know too much."

"Is he doing anything now?"

Renjou squinted: Coco was washing his face at the old sink. It was slowly filling with water of a pale-red color. He wiped the sink bowl a few times with his hand after the water had gone down.Renjou shook his head.

Mari found Coco inside the bathroom. He was bent over the sink and didn't notice her come in.

"Victor," Mari called him, but he didn't seem to hear her. He was still wearing the black glove, and was washing his other hand compulsively with the orange liquid soap.

Mari came closer: he turned abruptly, knocking down the little bottle, and it rolled off the counter and spilled to the floor.

"Mari..."

He was bleeding from the nose and mouth. Mari had never seen him like this before, even when he was speeding. He had absolutely insane eyes whose pupils had constricted themselves to literal pinpoints. The irises kept jumping, undecided on their diameters.

"Coco!"

Mari took a paper towel. She ran it under warm water and tried to clean his face, but he suddenly jerked away.

"Don't touch me," he said.

"Victor, what's wrong?"

He put his hands up to his face and looked at her through the barricade. "They're in me now," he said.

"What are you talking about?"

He took off the glove and showed her his left hand.

Mari stepped back and dropped the towel.

BREAK IN

"I want to go there."

"You can't."

"Why not?"

Renjou's Bubble Man was about to open its mouth, but Sam held him back: "We have our reasons, Leon. Just please believe me on this one."

"But why can't I go in there?" Leon persisted.

"Because it'll kill you," Renjou said.

"And if it kills her, it's ok? Is that what you're saying?"

Sam frowned. "Should we just tell him that she's a..."

Renjou's simulacrum issued a quiet groan. "I didn't say it was okay," he said to Leon, blocking Sam's surprise. "All I said is that it won't kill her." Renjou folded his bubble hands behind his back and began pacing about.

"How do you know?"

The Bubble Man did not respond. He flickered tiredly and issued another groan, this one of a more threatening nature. Leon was not supposed to be there, but had hacked his way through on Renjou's hot tracks. He insisted on coming to King's Hall instead of Lucky, interfering with their original plan.

"I want to go there. We can go there together."

"Leon, fuck off. Do what I tell you, for once." Renjou pulled on his hat. "Pain in the ass," he said, and went out of Sal's house, leaving his Bubble Man with a dour expression on its face, like a snowman that had been suddenly abandoned.Leon turned to Sam, but he waved him off. Leon approached him, but Sam's Bubble Man suddenly began picking its nose - it seemed, absently.For the time being, they had to let it slide, as Leon was catching them everywhere.

Before long, everyone at the Foundry knew of Coco's thready transformation, as he could no longer hide the colorful clusters of strings that now made up extensive parts of himself. By the end of the week, he looked like a colorful harlequin. Even in the form of a default Bubble Man, Coco had thick, liquid clusters growing through his chest and arms.

His transformation, however, led to a distinct advantage: now that he was threaded with the Temple, Coco could easily navigate any area he liked. Unlike the rest of the Founders, he could step on all the nodes and threads he wanted to without calling the sentries. When the Shadows did appear, lurking behind him, they paid him absolutely no attention and passed right on by. Coco had joined their league.

No one was permitted to touch him now, even Mari; although she tried to many times, he always intercepted her.

Before he would be gone completely to threads, Renjou decided to put him to good use: he had a certain idea, which he proposed openly before the whole group. On the morning of December 23rd, Renjou walked habitually into the room.At first, they talked about some miscellaneous things, as the Founders pelted him with questions, observations and other updates as he sat perched on the windowsill with Bailey on his lap. Then Renjou turned abruptly to Leon and asked him if he could rebuild some of the original Dabel.

"Yes," Leon said. "But why?"

"I want you to let him out," Renjou said, and Chi-Chi dropped his powdered donut.

They stared at him. One of Lucky's finger cusps came loose and drifted lazily to the floor.

"You're serious?" Leon asked him.

"Yeah. Set him loose, let him run around in their db." Renjou scratched Bailey absently behind the ear. "We only have a week left, anyway. Either way, we're fucked." His hand moved to massage Bailey meditatively between the shoulder blades.

"We just need to figure out a way to feed him the code."

"Who's going to feed him?" Leon inquired.

Renjou looked for a moment at the floor.

Coco got off his hexchair on impulse, scratching his long nose. He was about to leave the room, when Renjou took out a small black box from his pocket.

"What's that?" Coco asked, as Renjou presented it to him.

"Your Christmas present," Renjou said, but his face was dead.

Coco moved to open it, but Renjou stopped him short: "Not yet."

"So what's inside it?"

"Trippy bombs," Renjou answered, and Coco pulled away sharply from the case.

"What? Why trippy bombs? What's that supposed to mean?" Coco resumed scratching himself, as the strings wiggled and tickled him constantly. His face was mostly gone and he looked like a scarecrow made of colorful spun glass.

"If he falls for it," Renjou said, "he'll think he's ready to replicate - and if he does, all of his replicas will also have trippy bombs in them. That way we can take care of the whole Temple in one day, no matter what Sal says."

"That sounds too easy," Coco began, but stopped to push down some rebel strings back inside him with his fingers. "I can do it. How do you say? N.P."

"I sure hope so," Renjou said quietly, and looked away.

Leon consulted his face for a moment. "I'm going there too," he said.

Renjou raised his hand.

Later that evening, Leon came to Renjou after everyone else had left. Renjou was in no mood for company and was stretched out in his hexchair, digging with seeming randomness through the pockets of his coat. His left hand had already retrieved a lighter, but his right hand was still on its mission inside the pocket. He visibly frowned when he saw Leon come in and rearranged himself in his chair, as if hoping the persistent vision would just go back to wherever it had come from.

"What do you think?" Leon asked, pacing around.

"I think it will work," Renjou said, lighting a cigarette.

Leon walked over to the window and peered outside. It was already dark and the street was filling with blue and pink neon. Bailey was asleep on the windowsill, curled up in a ball. He wanted to touch her, almost did, but didn't. Bailey woke up suddenly and uncurled. He walked away from the window and sat down in Mari's chair next to Renjou. Renjou tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling.

"What will you do afterwards?" Leon asked.

"Fire you, for starters," Renjou replied, and coughed repeatedly.

Leon gave him a genuinely inquisitive look. They sat for a while in complete silence. Renjou wished to God that Leon would just go.

"What do you really want, Renjou?" he asked suddenly.

The smoker grimaced and looked at him a trifle scornfully. He dragged on his cigarette, surveying the distant, neon-lit Bailey on the windowsill. "What do I really want?" he repeated, his eyes grazing Leon. "To be free."

"What would you do, though?"

Renjou shrugged. "Don't interrogate me, Leon." He looked longingly in the direction of Bailey, who was grooming herself nervously: Bailey was busy tracking down a flea under her short fur, a task not unworthy of a hacker's cat. Leon watched her for a while, and then looked back at Renjou.

His face was unrecognizable now in the blue-lit shadows and seemed to be oddly still. He smiled, or winced, it was hard to tell which it was. "I don't know what I'd do," he said, at length.

"Probably nothing. It wouldn't make any difference, anyway." He got up. "I'm going to sleep."

IMAGO

There was no resistance as he moved through the gate to King's Hall. Renjou had opened it for him before he was thrown back. The lower segment of the giant green chrysalis wiggled slightly as Coco entered the room.

"Ah, bonjour, Madame!" he said, for that was the way he addressed the mute, brooding Dabel after he had spawned his numerous small cocoons.

It was almost as if Dabel had anticipated the Founders' ploy, and got busy replicating shortly before his feeding time. The new shells were also quite colorful, and hundreds of them, all of various ages and sizes, filled King's Hall, as well as the many rooms of the Temple. Some of these replicants were spinning like spinning tops, their silvery strings suspending them from the shadows on the ceiling, while others attached themselves to the floor by thick double threads. The threads ran in all directions out of this room, going through every doorway and crooked geometrical exit they could find. It was empty now in the hallways, as the Shadows tended to avoid them for fear they would step on a live thread.

In his hands, Coco's Bubble Man carried a small black box. It reminded him a little of his snuff case.

Under Renjou's watchful eyes, he began to climb the hard, slippery, shiny-green chrysalis. The enormous cyclopean glass eye seemed to be watching him. At times, Coco could see himself reflected in its smooth metallic surface, his own black eyes peering back at him from the bronze shell. He did not recognize his own face. It was strange to be so close to the silent giant, who seemed to be sleeping inside his cocoon. He wondered how he was going to wake him, and why he had volunteered so easily for the task.

"Careful, Coco," he heard Mari's voice say near him. Although Mari was forbidden from coming with him inside King's Hall, her tiny dummy simulacrum followed Coco everywhere. It was a singular small bubble that always floated near him, constantly tickling his ear. He slipped down to the floor once at the beginning of his climb, as the strings were not always reliable, and looked back up. The small bubble kept him company.

He climbed to the top of the chrysalis, using his own strings like soft grappling hooks by flinging them out from his hands, and perched his simulacrum on the tightly shut lips of the enormous mouth. If he had consulted Chi-Chi, he would have known that this was actually the end. The head was at the bottom. He looked at the little black box, dangling his legs childishly over the edge. The colorful strings descending from his ankles followed the motion like floating parade streamers. He was waiting for the sign.

"Now!" he heard Renjou say.

The strings spilled out of the box and instantly wrapped themselves around Coco's arms. He tried to ditch them, pulling them away with all his might, but they clung to him tenaciously.

"Merde!" he swore, trying to peel them off, but they kept climbing all over him in colorful bouquets.

The cocoon's lips opened a bit, as if it were a creature that had sensed prey at its mouth. Coco nearly tumbled into the black gap, but caught his balance. The giant lips opened wider, and the strings' pull on Coco increased. It was sucking him in.

"Help me!" he cried. "Fuck!"

In an instant, Coco disappeared inside its mouth.

Mari grabbed her cap.

"Are you nuts?" Renjou ran up to her and grabbed her by the arm.

"Let me go!" Mari said, pulling away from Renjou, but he held her back.

"You can't go in there! He'll kill you!"

"Let me go!" she cried, freeing one of her hands. It hit Renjou's face, hard, and he bounced back surprised, with a very peculiar expression.He pinned her to the chair.

"Renjou!" Leon called him. "I think he's coming out!"

They watched Coco climb out of the bottom of the shell. When he had emerged fully, he stretched out a bit and happily waved his arms. His Bubble Man was completely transparent now and free of any colors.

"What happened?" Mari asked him.

Coco didn't answer. He walked over to Mari and held her for a long time in his arms, as if drinking her.

"I'm free," he said at length.

They watched him. At first, Dabel was still sleeping. He seemed to be silently digesting the new strings.

In a few hours, the first infected cocoon popped out of the giant shell of the chrysalis: it was black, with thin, silver spinning things that came out of its top, as if it were a spool with loose threads. It ran about the floor for a while like a spinning top, sometimes bumping dumbly into the walls and Dabel, and then threw out a singular, long cable like a fishing line, and became attached by it between the ceiling and floor. It spun counter-clockwise for a while, and then changed direction. The next one emerged soon after that.

The Founders surveyed the bawdy scene: Dabel was spawning actively, and the cocoons were multiplying. There were hundreds, if not thousands of them jumping about on the floor, spinning and throwing out their silvery grappling hooks.

CRAZY HORSE

"Come in," her voice said, and Leon stepped into the room.

He opened the door carefully, delaying the pleasure of the hidden surprise. He was struck by the room's bluish darkness as he entered, and at first could not see anything at all.

"Lucky?" he called, but received no reply. He wasn't permitted to use his night vision, and stumbled blindly all around the room. Several times, he stubbed something heavy, probably the desk, and then nearly tripped over the recliner that stood by the window. He thought that he heard it groan a bit, but it was empty. He moved on, trying to locate the light switch, as the possible damage to his suit was beginning to outweigh the romantic factor of the darkness. He couldn't find the light switch, however, and was about to turn on his night vision, when Lucky's voice impatiently said: "Are you coming, or what?"

"I can't see you. Where are you?"

"Find me and fuck me already," was the reply, and he saw something red glowing darkly in the area near the old, single-paned window.

He turned on his night vision.

"You're cheating!" he heard her sly voice say.

Gradually, as his eyes adjusted, he discerned someone's tri-color silhouette in the long recliner by the window. The tri-creature was sitting on the recliner, but not in the usual way.

The colorful silhouette slightly arched its back in anticipation as he approached.

He placed one palm on the gentle convex small of Lucky's back, and her round bottom rounded out a bit more like a rising tan double moon, as she arched her warm body, queening under him.

"I can be a virgin every time, if you want," she said. "It doesn't bother me." She then began tightening his tie collar by pulling on its end like a shoe-master on a lace string. Leon placed his thumb into the collar just in case she got carried away.

He was now playing Lucky's horse on the bed, and suddenly felt a pair of round naked high heels dig into either side of him."Giddy up!" she cried. "You crazy horse!" She pulled on the tie slightly harder, so that it formed a taut line from his neck.Leon's face turned bright red. She rode him. "Are you really a...?" he began, but did not finish.

Lucky shrieked and pulled on the rein. The thumb inside the collar wasn't helping.

"I still wouldn't believe you, anyway," he said, grinning from ear to ear.

She laughed and slapped him on the ass.

They tried everything they could think of, some things just for the hell of it. Yes, even that.Theoretically, they could go on indefinitely, but after about four hours, their cooling fans began going berserk and even started giving off smoke, which instantly triggered the usually unresponsive fire alarm on the ceiling above them.

Leon and Lucky promptly disengaged and pulled the sheets over them to save themselves in case of rain. The fire alarm went on for about one or two minutes until Lucky subdued it by hovering up to the ceiling and giving it a brief but fierce electric pat with her hands, which caused a concentrically rippling, sea-green medusa to roll out from its epicenter. The alarm subsided after that, as if offended, and its mute red eye resumed its slow, vigilant blinking in the darkness above their bed.To give their fans a break, they lay down next to each other and spent some time silently studying the darkness. The night was quiet, and only some sort of bugs, probably crickets, were going off under the bed. For his part, Leon was wondering about the possibility of future sex, but judging by the rattling inside him, it would probably have to be postponed; at least until tomorrow. He was badly overheated now, and genuinely concerned about starting a fire.He stared at the tricky red eyes of the fire alarm overhead, running his hand up and down through the bright flames of Lucky's hair, which, just like her eyes, seemed to be glowing in the dark. He wasn't sure if this was an optical effect or something his eyes had made up to compensate for the otherwise deep pitch-black.

THIEF

Ever since their encounter in the downtown alley, Leon had a strange and very persistent feeling that he was being watched: it stayed with him constantly, even at night. He began to lose sleep and tried to stay at the Foundry into the late evenings, talking with Coco and Mari and playing cards, mostly solitaire. (The Larouxes lived in the Foundry, and although Mari went to bed early, Coco sometimes stayed up and kept him company.)

One morning, he nearly struck the harmless Chi-Chi in the Foundry's basement - he thought he was a stalker, but stopped suddenly when he saw his eyes. One night he returned to find his door covered with a bright string of arabesques: "Fuck you," they read, in red ink.It was late.

Mari had already gone to sleep upstairs, and everyone was gone from the Foundry for the night except Leon, who was sitting next to Coco in his hexchair.

Leon was flipping absently through a picture book. It belonged to Coco and was colorfully illustrated, but by that default alone, it was not really suitable for children. His hand briefly grazed the cover.

"What is this?" he asked.

"What? This? Little Red Riding Hood," Coco replied. "Close your eyes, listen."

Leon closed his eyes and listened, but he could not hear anything. He slowly opened his eyes again, as Coco took the book from his hands and flipped through it until he found another story.

"How about this one?" he said, handing Leon the fairytale. "It always starts playing backwards too; you have to wait a bit."

True to Coco's warning, the book burst open with an uncanny backward-playing symphonic song.

"What's it called?" Leon asked, attempting to turn it down.

"I don't know," Coco replied, stretching lazily in his hexchair.

Leon kept flipping through the pages. The pictures were coming together for him, and Coco laughed, looking at the ceiling, which was covered with dancing lights. "Who said that 2d animation was dead?" he said, but Leon did not hear him. He was looking at something - there was a girl walking through the forest, a shock of red moving through the dark trees. There were others there, too. They kept appearing and disappearing.

"All they're doing is screwing around," Leon observed. "What's the point of this cartoon, anyway?"

Coco gave him a prolonged and scornful, yet largely unserious kind of look: "Of all the people, Leon, I thought you'd be the lover, not the wood." He stretched out lazily in his chair. "I have to go to sleep now," he said, and got up, clumsily scratching himself under his left arm. He went out of the small room, heading upstairs. He stumbled a few times, as it was dark, but he did not want to disturb Mari.

"Bonne nuit, Pinocchio," his voice said from the darkness that led to his and Mari's room.

"Bonne nuit," Leon replied quietly, and got up. It was time to go, no matter how long he tried to stretch out that time inside the Foundry.

He was walking up the long stairs that led to the seventh floor of the Upper Deck (the elevator was still non-functional, and had been for several months now- there was no anticipated repair date, and the amount of things that fell into its jammed, partially open mouth was astounding). It was already dark on all the stair landings, as usual, since the tenants had long ago caught all of the small, elusively floating lamps and sold them for parts on the black market. He'd forgotten to turn on his night vision earlier, and it would take some time for it to come on and adjust itself.

Even though he wasn't really permitted to install a Night-On, Leon had done so because he was sick of carrying flashers and other beacons on his way home from work. Having a light on also made him a thief's easy target, and this was the place to find them if there ever was a place.

Every time he stopped at a stair landing (he'd have to climb seven in all), he felt that someone was waiting below in the darkness. He turned on his night vision and looked into the black pool, which exploded in pretty shades of tri-color - mostly green and blue, with rare streaks of red and, occasionally, violet. Gradually as his eyes adjusted, he began to see a better, more sharply focused picture. The lower stair landing was empty.

After listening for any possible signs of his stalker, he began to run up the stairs. He covered the first four flights in under a minute, a feat usually unachievable even to a light build like him.

He approached his unit in the dark hallway and began dialing the round gate's entry code, but something made him stop. He dropped the tack, and it rolled away from him across the dark floor.

Leon looked around.

It was a shady figure with a hood covering its face, but its overall shape and mass reminded him of someone from their previous encounter in the downtown alley.

The figure emerged from the hallway shadows and hooked him, sending a blue electric shock through his ribcage. For an instant, the flash of blue illuminated the dirt-covered walls of the tenement, and he saw his red-lettered door swaying and wavering as he fell.

"I'll poke your eyes out, fucker!" the shadowy figure announced, folding and unfolding his hand - it appeared to be stuck, however.

"What the fuck do you want?" Leon said, blocking another hit with his arms and left leg; the rest of him was already frozen. He saw the thug's right hand suddenly unfold itself into a spinning fan of blades.

The thug did not reply. He kept hitting him in the head, knocking out the Night-On and the fan motors. The world became awash with liquid black.

The thug kicked him about some more with his heavy square foot, dealing out well-placed as well as random hits that were heavily damaging his lightly built Nelcro. He then sent him falling down several sets of stairs. Leon could only hear the dents inside his head as they fell like hail all around him.

He couldn't see anything anymore; in a few moments, after he'd stopped rolling down the first landing stairway, he felt EZ's sharp tools unscrewing his eyes. He took them out like light bulbs, one by one, pulling them out by their strings from the orbits. He pocketed them quietly and walked away whistling, hands in his pockets.

His transparent blue ears drifted away down the hallway, and the world became still and dark.

LOVE

She was about to walk by on her way up to Leon's floor, when something silver-metallic caught her eye under the first landing of the stairs.

She peered into the darkness, walking over some broken fragments that clicked and crunched under her heels. She moved closer to the pale scrap of metal and suppressed a scream.She flew quickly up the stairs, holding Leon close like a broken doll in her arms. She paused before the scary red-lettered door and looked around.

She began dialing the round code panel, but it suddenly wobbled and came loose, tumbling out of its nest to the floor.

She opened the door and stepped inside. She looked around: everything seemed to be in order here, just the way she'd seen it the last time.

She laid him down on the bed. His one arm fell off the edge to the floor. She tried to wake him up, but he didn't respond. He seemed to be dead, but she knew that he was still here. She breathed into his mouth, trying to reactivate the fans, but they remained silently shut.

She began to open his head compartment in the hopes of jolting his drives awake. As a last resort, she was prepared to take them out.

She first opened the small panel at the nape of Leon's neck, but stopped at that: there was a tube spine - the mark of a Genie. She carefully closed the lid.

She didn't know what to do. The longer he remained like this, the more likely he was to suffer complete brain death. The maximum time was twenty-four hours.

Genies were illegal, and she didn't know anyone or any place that operated on them, at least, out in the open. She peered into his eyes, which looked frozen and dead - there were no eyeballs, just empty sockets with remnants of aperture petals.

She tried, one more time.

It was an extreme measure. Placing both her palms on his chest, she sent out an electric jolt. She used about thirty J's, but it had no effect: neither his eyes nor his motors responded to the jolting zap.

She held his face between her hands and kissed him for what could be the last time. Then she laid herself down on top of him, trying to be as flush as possible with his body, and, essentially, began electrocuting him, slowly increasing the power as she felt. Pale sea-green jellyfish medusas jumped all over the room, rising above the bed silently in a concentrically ringed tunnel.

Suddenly, Lucky was blinded: his eyes had resumed working, opened their apertures and a bright, uncovered beacon went on inside his head, sending a shock of light out of the black sockets. He arched out under her, and she fell off the bed.

She looked into his face. "Leon!" she called him, and his apertures shuddered and slid wide open. "Leon, Leon, Leon LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON LEON."

She took out the memory pill and placed it on the tip of her long tongue, then rolled it around inside her mouth, scrolling through and processing its contents. This was the core dump, but most of the data had been corrupted, and she couldn't find anything useful, only snippets and flashes. Also, to her surprise, a music soundtrack had somehow fallen into it, probably by mistake. It was a song she'd never heard before, but it sounded special. It was a very old song, and she let it play on her inbuilt speakers - without, of course, using exterior sound. The song was a bit slow for her taste, but Lucky liked it. She turned up the track inside her head. It played scratchily because it was still messing up after the jolt, but gradually she began to hear the words:

"Spending all my nightsAll my money going out on the town..."

"Baby come back," went the refrain.

Lucky bobbed her head, watching Leon's calm, sleeping face. She sat down on the edge of the bed beside him and placed her hand on his head, slowly running her fingers through his dark hair, moving unconsciously with the rhythm.

"Now that I put it all togetherGive me the chance to make you seeHave you used up all the love in your heartNothing left for meAin't there nothing left for me"

If Lucky had spent more time at school back in her day, she'd have known that it was called "Baby Come Back" by an American rock band called Player, who recorded it in the late 1970's. 1977, to be precise.

The song kept playing in her head long after it had stopped on its corrupt source inside the core dump.

Leon recovered slowly, but he was never again the same. Something was broken inside him.

"Who did it?" Lucky asked him, when he was able to talk.

"EZ," he said. His voice box had been replaced, but his voice remained oddly desaturated.

"Who's EZ?"

"A thief."

EZ

"That crazy bitch is trying to kill me!" EZ said.

EZ was seated just across from Mike, but a thick glass bouncer - a wall used to keep inmates on one side, and visitors on the other at the maximum security penitentiary in Willowcreek Bay, separated them.

Mike was smoking a cigarette he had received from EZ. He tilted his head back, looking through his own personal cloud of grey smoke. EZ came to visit his brother every week now during "date time" - usually between four and five in the morning, which was bound to turn almost anyone off from having an actual date. EZ's remaining hours were occupied by various jobs he was pulling off by the hour for his new boss, Saleri, but the latter wasn't cutting him much slack by way of pay. The bail on Mike was set at fifty NKU Grand, and that was a problem: later that afternoon, one of EZ's many appointments was a bank job; followed by the hairdresser (he needed a new cut).

"How do you know she's after you?" Mike asked, pulling on his long fingers.

"She put graffiti all over my door..."

"So what? Big deal." He blew out a large ring of orange smoke, and watched it float mesmerizingly up to the ceiling.

"You didn't let me finish," EZ said. "The next day, I found trippy bombs all over my place. I don't even know where she got them." EZ brought his right hand out of his coat pocket and wiggled its fingers in front of Mike's glassed-over face: several of them were paralyzed, sticking out in stiff, straight lines like sticks from their sockets. "The guy who tried to help me almost got electrocuted. Almost."

"What guy?" Mike inquired suspiciously.

"New roomie - don't worry - it's just for the job, I'm shelling him in at the end."

"Hmm..."

"Mike, don't be such an ass. All I need's my old roomie back." He tapped the glass once, and then scratched the tip of his nose with the small, nail file-like extension of his forefinger.

Mike stared past EZ through the screen: they were bringing in Dr. Jurgen. Dr. Jurgen's face was flushed, and his straw-like hair was standing out in all directions - it appeared that he'd just gotten axed, and Mike decided to indicate the fact to EZ, but instead just turned his head in the opposite direction and looked at the dirty black-and-white checkers that were crawling all over the floor. One of them had just found a new piece of garbage and was clawing it into its mouth like a small crab.

TIC-TAC-TOE

All of the machines at the Foundry were now infected: Coco's monitor was almost exclusively showing porn; Mari was mad: hers was fluttering starkly with yellow butterflies. Chi-Chi's monitor was crawling with colorful insects of various species, sizes, and shapes, while Kirby and Curly's vacant machines played Tic-Tac-Toe among themselves. It was hard to tell who was winning.

Renjou was pressing them even harder. Leon had tried everything by now and was at the end of his rope. He stopped talking to anyone, even Lucky, and hid frequently behind her second pair of dark aviators.

They were trying to shuffle out all the bugs in the latest soup for Dabel - or rather, put in all the right ones to get Dabel to thread with the Temple. Renjou was standing over Leon's shoulder, holding onto his fedora just in case.

"Any other ideas?" Renjou asked him.

"I don't have any other ideas at this time," Leon replied. His voice sounded completely drained. Although Renjou could not see his eyes, he knew what was happening behind the dark shades. He let him get away just thinking it.

"You can go suck a monkey's dick if you don't have any other ideas," Renjou said, and Mari chastised him instantly with a brief but solidly cryogenic stare from her usually pale hazel eyes.

Renjou dropped his hat.

"Monkey off your back," Coco noted to Leon, tipping off his hand salute to the MC.

Renjou continued anyway. "We don't have any time, Leon. Either we get it working, or come New Year's Day, we're all fucked." He looked over at Bailey on the sunlit windowsill and picked up his hat. "This is our last back up, so jump on it." He tipped his hat to Bailey and left the room.

THE LITTLE PRINCE

The dark violet clouds were densely covering the sky. There had never been a need for a weather forecast system.

Green, pale medusas of lightning zapped around the clouds, sending them round and round the dome's sky in circles like goaded sheep on their orbit. It scared everyone, especially Renjou. The peaceful cows that inhabited the outlying green fields were soon brought inside the big red barn that was an artificial milk processing plant, where they would be safe from the effects of the storm. Most free range, formerly "home" animals had also been gathered into it in case of another jolt.

Sal's Bubble Man was flickering constantly now: even his own room did not recognize him very well anymore. Everyone else who came in was almost invisible.

"It's going to be really difficult now to crack open its architecture," Sal said. "He's like a goddamn old man: wrinkly and complicated. When I built him, he was a nice little prince. At least he kept things running."

"Wait a minute...You made Dabel?" Renjou's Bubble Man was slowly rubbing the top of his head, transparent fingers poking through the surface of his head bubble.

"Yeah," Sal replied. "It was a long time ago, and then it stopped working."

Sam looked over at Renjou. Renjou's eyes popped a bit: "You knew?"

Sam's Bubble Man shrugged.

"Now the only thing left is to trigger it," Sal continued, "but I'll need someone to shut it down from the inside before it blows up. Potentially..."Sam gave Sal a look, and Sal stopped.

"But why would it blow up?" Renjou's voice interrupted the floating grey silence. "I thought it was a compression bomb."

"I don't know, Renjou," Sal replied. "It's just a terminal phrase, I suppose. He rubbed the tip of his nose elegantly with one finger: "And besides, it'll probably look pretty good, I suppose, assuming we make it out of the Temple."

After Sam's Bubble Man had left, Renjou turned to Sal with a somewhat rearranged expression, which instantly made Sal want to kick him out the door.

"Sal, why..."

Sal did not let him finish. "Fuck off, Renjou," he said. "I don't know."

Renjou's Bubble Man distantly scanned the grey floor. He suddenly raised his head. "What about Nina, did you make her?"

"Renjou, I thought I told you..."

"Did you make her, or not?" Renjou was pressing his bubble hard against Sal's, so that their surfaces clicked unpleasantly and tensed, as if about to explode. Sal's bubble began to flicker, but Renjou still kept him down, zapping him away.

"Putain de merde!" Sal exclaimed, finally going out under him. "I don't make synthons, Renjou, so beat it."

He managed to free his hand and angrily popped Renjou's Bubble Man with his finger. Renjou smiled, and his Bubble Man fell off.Renjou paused in the gateway, trying to catch his eye, but Sal was still angry and Renjou's efforts went largely unpunished. He waited. He waved a few of his arms teasingly from the doorway, then tried running up the wall just for the hell of it, but was held back. He tumbled back down to the floor, and perched himself inside the round mouth of the gateway.

"Why do you always look like that?" Sal asked, without really looking at the gate.

The Centipede became still and vainly shrugged his multiple sets of shoulders.

"You know, if you're gonna appear to somebody, you better look good," he said, and waved all of his black arms teasingly from the gateway's reinforced steel door.

"And remind me to fire you when we all get back," Sal said, now apparently on his own train of thought.

"You can leave it up to Renjou," said the Centipede, pulling on a long whisker.

He dialed a double gate code and finally went out of Sal's house.

Sal scanned around him, and locked all of the gates in the walls.

MEDUSA

It tried to kill him. It tried to kill him for a long time, but something made it stop.

EZ was home after the bank job. He had ditched the roomie, who'd just gotten a new cut, and was now lying back in the round recliner inside their room, absently watching the coverage of the latest developments outside the Metrodome. It was raining beyond the open window, and the old, tattered curtains drifted lazily back and forth in the cold breeze. Sometimes the room was flashed by brief jolts of lightning as the telly replayed damage caused by the storm. It was getting cold inside the room, but EZ was tired and continued lazing on the recliner. The broadcast was showing angrily darting green electric clouds that jumped all over the sky like scattering marble balls. Oddly, he noticed something very strange about the Metrodome that he hadn't quite noticed before. EZ sat still, rubbing his neck and looking at the screen: he did not recollect when the Metrodome had sprouted its third dome. It was larger than the two previous ones, and was soon followed by another one of a similar shape and color. He reached for the glass of water that stood on the table, but did not drink it.The window to his room suddenly swung shut. The old curtains flapped down like dreary ghosts over them. EZ got up, dropping the glass of water to the floor. The green glow was approaching, moving silently as if on an invisible string - a sphere of light with tentacle-like projections. It was whispering or hissing something angrily as it crawled through the room, and EZ incorrectly assumed that it was his former roomie.

"Here, take the money, here, take it, just don't hurt me!" EZ began spilling out the contents of his coat - data chiplets, some worth more than others.

"I don't want it," the bristling Medusa replied, in a voice that sent chills up and down EZ's tube spine.

The pale green ball kept creeping closer to him on the floor, then paused, and made a brief mock-dart at EZ. He jumped up on reflex onto the recliner. "What do you want?" he cried.

"Leon!" it hissed back, and EZ's face went numb as he collapsed.

It tried to kill him.

It tried to kill him, rolling him like a puppet about the floor. EZ was helpless now, and his arms and legs jerked uncontrollably in all directions, while the Green Medusa played with him, throwing him in burning green waves all over the room.

After a while, it stopped and seemed to go away somewhere. EZ heard the water tap turn on in the kitchen. He would have shuddered, were it not for his already frozen central system. He watched the tips of his fingers twitching uselessly next to him on the floor.

When she returned, she was carrying a glass, but it was filled with a black, dense liquid.

Lucky was about to pour it down the black gaping panel at the back of his neck, but stopped.

ORISON

Mike stopped his eyes for a moment when he saw EZ come into their date room. He got up and put his nose to the glass bouncer, considerably flattening it.

"EZ? What happened?"EZ's face was almost completely melted: the only reason Mike recognized him now was because of the special processor inside his head.

"Holy shit, who did this to you?" Mike asked.

EZ didn't answer. He sat down in the visitor's chair and reached into his bag. He brought out a pair of cigarettes and handed them to Mike through the slot, for some reason trying to keep his hands out of Mike's direct line of sight. They had thin, fragile looking legs and looked like they were going to break any minute. They were probably hash, too.

"You wanna smoke?" Mike asked him, lighting up. He thought about the pair of cigarettes, and then brushed his hair back.

EZ looked at him once, meaningfully, then brought his hands out of his pockets and simultaneously flipped Mike a birdie and a dice cup. His left hand was a permanently stiff birdie. His right hand was ready to make love.

"Umm...ok, I understand you're upset right now, EZ," Mike said, scratching his head.

"Mike, you fucking idiot," EZ said. "I'm stuck."

* 8

The cocoons turned pale silver, glittering like so many glass ornaments within the Temple's dark halls. Every one of them was spinning quickly now on its axis, silver lights bouncing about the walls.

They were ticking like clocks after Sal had set off the trigger, and would all implode at different times based on their age. Sam and Sal were waiting on the other end while Renjou's simulacrum crawled the Temple's hallways.

In his twelve hands, Renjou carried a massive cluster of cables - all the major threads that spanned the database. He dragged the cables through King's Hall and approached Dabel's shell.He climbed the enormous monster like a professional electrician, using his numerous legs to hold on to the slippery shell. He tickled its lip, and the mouth slid precariously ajar. Renjou dropped the cables into the gaping frozen pit, and then dove into it. The Centipede was very long and seemed to be going in indefinitely, like some sort of monstrous cargo train with many legs. At last, the lips closed once again and Renjou disappeared.

Bailey suddenly curled up and became still on the windowsill.

Back at Sal's house, Sam's Bubble Man gave Sal a worried look.

The cocoons' ticking increased, and they began to spin even faster, causing the room to vibrate. Dabel's massive shell began to roll softly from side to side like a giant pendulum, snapping off some of the strings that attached it to the ceiling. Suddenly, the shell opened simultaneously at both its top and end and began to evert, throwing out two fountains of thin gold and silver strings: they ran out of either end of its body, coating Dabel with a glistening new shell. The everting strings formed concentrically around the giant chrysalis and it began to spin. The other cocoons followed suit, changing their spin on a dime, seemingly undecided on their direction.

Like the loose strings of an old cloth, the fabric of the Temple began to unwind, drawn into the vortex around Dabel. The Temple began to wrap itself around him, dragging all its hallways, rooms, and passageways round and round. They shrank into miniatures as Dabel was spinning, each layer growing successively smaller than the one that followed, like an ever scaling set of nesting dolls. Several times, Dabel changed his spin direction, warping the layers, until he settled on a constant motion counterclockwise. The distorted Temple soon formed an enormous new cocoon around Dabel, and then the spinning abruptly stopped. The giant shell floated by itself in the middle of nothing."Renjou," Sal called the final trigger."I'm here," the trigger replied. "En Garde!"

The Temple exploded, flashing up in bright beams of light, and the new shell disintegrated.

The shrunken interior had turned black, as if it had been burned out. It was a small, spool-like core about the size of a fist.

Renjou's double was complete.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Coco and Mari were the only people left inside the Foundry that night.

Coco lay back in his chair, flipping open the small black case again to inspect its contents. He briefly surveyed himself in its small round mirror, then shut it and looked over at Mari.Mari was lying tiredly on her side in her extra-soft hacker's chair, one arm folded beneath her head. Her breasts were milking, and her eyes were closed. Her face was calm; she seemed to be asleep. She opened one hazel eye and looked at Coco."I love you, Victor," she said.

They waited. It was twelve to midnight.

The news broadcast came on: it interrupted the coverage of the local celebrations to bring news of an extensive rainstorm that had suddenly broken out over a particular mountain. Renjou rubbed all twelve of his hands, watching Bailey grooming herself on the windowsill.

He turned to Coco and Mari, pulling on his fedora, which was decorated accidentally with a fallen grey party streamer.

"If this works out," Renjou began, but before he lowered it into place, Coco interrupted: "Look!" Coco was pointing at the screen.

The previously silent graphs were now jumping.

Renjou grinned and nodded his head."Happy New Year," he said, and walked out of the building, forgetting, for once, to put on his hat, which had already turned black.

He was still laughing as he walked down the street, waving off the annoying clinging green street lamps, which floated about him giggling like silly young flies.

It was a cold night out.

YESTERDAY

Coco had stopped looking at the clock long ago, ever since the broadcast. He sat down by Mari's side on her hacker's chair, and it creaked unhappily under their double weight.

"Mari, what would you like to do when we return?" Mari opened both her eyes and surveyed him carefully. His black eyes had somehow changed color, and were light once again, almost Mari's pale hazel-blue.

"How about Paris?" he said. "I've always wanted to go there. Mari, how about you?"

"I don't know," she replied. "I'd like to go somewhere."

"I'll come with you," he said quietly, touching her neck. "Can we do the same thing we did yesterday?"

Mari raised her eyebrows.

"Sure," she said.

RAMONA

They stood on the little pavilion bridge that ran above a black, cold night river named Ramona. It was almost midnight.

They waited.

The fireworks were starting up. Some of them were small, dry and very noisy, and probably illegal, while the others shot up magnificently into the night sky, showering it with liquid diadems of various colors.

"I'm going to miss you," Lucky said. She looked down at the black water below the bridge, which reflected the numerous, hovering, green lanterns.

"We'll meet again sometime," Leon said, his voice dipping strangely and finally drowning out.Lucky glanced at him and turned away. She put her hands on the bridge railing, looking down at the silently flowing black river below. The green lanterns wobbled in their own reflections. She quickly brought one hand to her face, and then replaced it again on the railing.

She wanted to, but she couldn't stop. Her shoulders rose and fell.

"Lucky..."

He reached out and put his hands around her face, turning it carefully toward him. The sad face seemed to float in the darkness, illuminated spontaneously by the occasional flash.

The fireworks had reached their peak by now and were going off one after another into the sky. Their bright bursts lit up the brooding violet night clouds, which drifted unsuspectingly in the otherwise calm night sky. The happy crackling of the firing rockets was followed each time by distant, echoing cheers that seemed to rise from the dark valley somewhere below the rolling hills.

Leon watched Lucky's face. She had stopped crying and was looking intently at him; the pale green pools of her irises seemed to be drinking him. She seemed to be him with her eyes.

"Lucky..." he began.

"I love you, Leon," she said, and pulled her arms around him.

The fireworks shot up again into the sky, illuminating the lurking night clouds.

MIKE AND EZ

Mike was bailed out at about eleven thirty in the evening. Most of the prison staff was out to celebrate, and it took EZ two hours of intricate lock work to get to Mike's special room. At first, Mike thought it was the retainer, who always seemed to have a beef with him, even though Mike had never even seen his face. For some reason, all of the cells had opened, but not his. He was stuck inside watching the rushing mess, which subsided after a while and moved itself out of the walls of the Orison, which was the name of the prison in Willowcreek Bay.

Mike and EZ were inside the Sammara nightclub. The hot legs of the neon girls flashed through the smoke. There were far fewer Dolls here than real girls, and they could barely see them anyway through the shining, wavering thick clouds. Mike was dipping heavily into his glass next to EZ - he had just got out thanks to his help and they came here to celebrate, but their general mood wasn't very celebratory. EZ took one of Mike's cigarettes and lit it up, inspecting it first as if it were a roach. He turned it for a while in his hands before inserting it into his mouth. It was a cheap sort and reeked of low-grade traffic pollutants, but it was special. He closed his eyes, trying to determine how much smoke he was actually inhaling, and how much of it was freely contributing to the thick atmosphere of the place, but he couldn't really tell.

The black and white checkered floor trembled suddenly as if made of water and vanished below their feet.

Mike looked up and saw that he was alone. On closer inspection, he noticed that there was absolutely nothing at all around him: no EZ, no drunk Oakley by the back wall with a passed out patron, no dancing strippers, and not even smoke.

Mike looked around wildly. "EZ?" he called.He shook his head, and thoughtlessly reached for his drink again, but it was nowhere to be found. It was deafeningly silent.

Then there was a sound.

It seemed to be rising inside his head, or what he thought was his head. It was a pleasant, deep reverberating sound like the longest closed "O".

The floor began to reappear, along with the strippers and smoke.

"Mike?" EZ looked around. "What the hell just happened here?" he asked him, but Mike had already passed out happily on the bar.

EZ looked up at the flickering white neon: the flashing legs of the letters spelled out, "Le Crazy Horse."

"How the fuck did we get here?" he asked no one in particular. He looked across the bar and saw a vaguely familiar looking young man of about twenty, whose eyes were fixated on something in the smoky distance ahead. EZ followed his line of sight and saw that he was watching a girl over at the next bar: she was coiling on top of the counter, her black hair flashing kaleidoscopically into different colors as she turned. He squinted into the neon lights, trying to remember where he'd seen her, but with the exception of the downtown alley, no other memories returned.

RENJOU

Renjou was drunk and deep asleep. His head was partially buried beneath the pillow. He fell asleep with a splitting headache, which diminished only slightly, even after four or five solid good drinks. Suddenly, somewhere across the room, his phone began to ring.

Renjou tried to cover his splitting head with a pillow, but it kept on ringing insistently anyway. He groaned and got off the couch, nearly slipping off its seat to the floor. He looked around: he was in his Nokida office, but for some reason, it failed to surprise him.

He walked over to the table and picked up the phone, clearing his throat.

"Renjou?" he heard a familiar voice say.

"Yeah, who is this?" he asked hoarsely.

"Renjou, don't you recognize me?"

Renjou rubbed his temples with one hand, wincing. "Ugh...What year is it?"

"4535," the voice answered, laughing.

"Who is this?"

"Renjou, it's me, Sam."

