After the show, she collapses. Her manager throws her into a tub of ice water and her body temp re-regulates. That’s the problem with this model: heat waste. She’s almost a gynoid at this point. Fake skin, fake nails, fake eyes, fake hair. Fake fake fake but more real than anything else is the money she’s pulling in for these shows. A great investment, thinks the manager. Well worth the expenditure. Well worth the cost. She’ll be asleep for a few hours and then they’ll slap on some stimulant snaps to wake her up so she can do the next show. Everything is prepared for her arrival. Everything is running smooth and on time. Just let her sleep.

Dozens converge on them, waves breaking over a single black rock. Bodies pressed against warm steel, fingers splayed against black glass that can stop small-caliber gunfire. Inside the car, neon-pink cocktails are mixed, poured, flavored, shared, sipped and savored. The One with the Hair unzips her blouse and struggles out of a clingy, stretchy top the color of the moon over Los Angeles. She’s a wispy, jittery thing made of cotton candy and flower petals.

“You got snaps?”

The other passenger flashes a plastic film about the size of credit card. “Scute™-compatible.” she says. The One with the Hair plucks it from her friend’s hand. She holds it against her skin until her snaps’ receptors grab hold of the film and bond it with her skin. “Ugh, this one is Japanese.” she says, her nose crinkling. “It’s all breast augs.”

Her friend motions “give it here” and says, “Let me have it then. I left my mobsofts are back at the hotel.” The One with the Hair ejects the film and peels it from her skin.

“I like the ‘Fun Shapes’ better.” she says as her friend slaps the snapware onto the back of her neck. A few seconds later and her Scute reconfigures to the new proportions, complete with a shift in coloration. “Too tight?” she asks and the One with the Hair shakes her head, “No, just right.”

The driver pulls away onto the street and the car accelerates to city-travel speeds somewhere between “maniac cab driver” and “subway.”  The girls inside load Scute-talk into their carrie-alls and link the portable devices to receptors in their hips.

The One with the Hair holds her friend’s hand and places it on her heart. So where we headed?

Uptown.

She watches the feed on her wrist. Video plays across her flawless white skin. She flips through the channels until she sees the car. Overhead, a helicopter churns the air as it races over the rooftops, its cameras trained on the limo.

They’re covering us.

Her friend glances down at the wrist video. “Oh, yeah.” Check the ratings?

Middling. A sigh.

Should we roll down the windows? Sunroof? Make out?

Pandering. Just let it be… I’m tired anyway and the car’s paid for. She leans forward and rests her head in her friend’s lap. Her turquoise eyes flutter closed. Pale pink eyelids and butterfly lashes.

But he’s not looking at it. His eyes are focused on the space beyond. Through the wall, burning two holes in the wall and through the forehead of the man at the desk in the next room. A samurai sword leans against the wall, a striped necktie wrapped around the hilt. He wants that office and that sword.

The tie? He could take it or leave it.

Minutes before he was pacing back and forth, moving with such intensity that if he kept walking straight he’d walk right through the wall into the next office. The corner office.

He’s on the phone now. Chattering away about nothing with nobodies. He sees a heaving bosom in his peripheral vision and glances up. His secretary, Christine, wearing a red dress and some kind of starburst brooch on which he is now trying to focus.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” he says.

“I knocked,” she says.

She sits on the edge of the desk, knees pressed together, ankles crossed. One high heeled shoe slips off her foot and falls to the floor.

“New man in your life?” he asks her, looking down at the curve of her thigh.

“No, just a present for myself. A little retail therapy.” The scabbard is simple yet elegant, a single pale stone in a silver setting. The craftsmanship is old world and beautiful. The curve of the blade follows her shape.

“May I?” he asks and she smiles.

“I thought you’d never ask.” She reaches down and pulls out the blade. It’s a wavy dagger, double-edged.

“Kris? Very nice. Oh, I get it…”

She smirks, the corner of her smile turning up. She’s all curves and sharpness today.

“My turn.” He reached under his desk and withdraws a package wrapped in silk and tied with a violet ribbon.

Her eyebrow goes up. “I presume this is for that new girl in Finance you’ve been seeing?”

He pats the package and rubs his palm across it. “I don’t see any conflict of interest, do you? It’s a katar I had shipped here from a Kalari Payattu master in Karnataka. An old friend and business partner.”

“Lady killer.” she says, slipping off the desk and toeing her shoe back onto her foot.

“She needs something better than that pressed steel junk if she wants that promotion.”

“Lady killer and influence peddler?” Christine slips the kris knife back into its sheath and shimmies the dress back over her thigh. “You have that meeting in 15 with Franklin.” Her eyes dart over to the far side of the room, above the fish tank.

“I know. Getting my head in the right place. Breathing exercises. Meditation, you know.”

Christine turns to leave and says, “Good luck. He leads with his left side, FYI.”

“Thanks. And if I manage to take his fucking head off, you’re getting a raise.”

Time. The one thing you can’t spend more than you have. And you never have enough.

He rattles the spoon around as he empties three Dominos sugars into the cup. His mind races to the huge neon sign overlooking Baltimore’s harbor. It costs a hundred grand a year to power those lights, he thinks. Then he remembers he’s not in the Charm City.

He’s back in Hamilton. It always comes back to Hamilton.

No matter where he’s lived, and he’s lived all over, something pulls him back here. It holds him down, strangles and suffocates him. The city is like quicksand. The more he struggles to free himself, the faster he sinks. Wait long enough and you’ll either discover you’ve freed yourself somewhere along the way or you wake up choking, dying. The Glass City is like some massive constrictor snake. An embrace that turns into a death grip.

On the wall is a calendar. There’s some long-legged bird tiptoeing through marshland. Birds Unlimited poster or something. A heron, perhaps. Why that bird for this month, he wonders. He goes to take a sip and realizes the cup is empty. Where did that time go? The waitress is a woman with a round body and a pleasant Eastern European accent.

“More?” and he puts his hand over the cup.

“No, thank you. I’m heading out.”

She scribbles onto a pad, tears out a sheet and lays it upside-down on the table. “When you’re ready.” is all she says before heading back through the doors into the kitchen. There’s nobody else here.

Fingertips glance over the table, across a scattering of sugar that spilled out from the packets. He flips over the bill and rifles through his billfold for correct change. The number doesn’t come as quickly as it ought to. He rounds up to 20%. Twice the tax, move the decimal point. He leaves a five dollar bill and collects his things: a pen and the notebook. It’s filled with tiny print, precise like a machine typeset the pages. It’s filled with a hundred thousand facts, or pieces of facts. Not that he needs that book; everything he sees or hears is committed to memory. But writing it, being able to see it… well, that just seems to make it easier. Even if it’s just to jar loose a fragment of a thought.

But right now, all he wants to do is sleep.

That’s all he’s ever wanted. So for the first time in many, many years. He lays down his head on the table and shuts his eyes.

Poetry changes when viewed through the prism of time and space. The concept of beauty is altered when seen through the veil of mathematics. In the dim light I study the fractals on the bed sheet, the geometry of her face, the measured rhythm of her heartbeat as she dreams. And what does she dream? I press my hand to her forehead. Her skin is warm, soft. Like me, she was born a few years after the Originals arrived. We both grew up exploring the corridors, the gardens, the refineries. Playing on the world’s largest jungle gym, tethered to unfinished webs of steel and spun carbon, floating through caverns of white, propelled by sticky-fingered gloves and booties. A life better than any kid could ask for, and better than any kid ever knew. Electrons spark between us and the circuit closes. I’m inside.

Our minds touch, a gauzy and indistinct barrier separating our memories. I skim the surface of her thoughts, then unfold the past like I’m unmaking origami butterflies. I see the first day we met. Her father’s funeral, before things changed for the better. The glow on her cheeks the first time we kissed. She stirs in the dream and I curl my fingers around that wisp of nascent ephemera. I draw it out. She’s holding a lovely little girl. Our daughter, I realize, when I see her bright smile and my tightly-curled black hair. Her father’s nose. My mother’s eyes.

My eyes open and I stare at the ceiling. My palm moves down to her belly and I imagine what it would be like to be a father. Especially a father here. No worries, no fears. So why am I worried? Why am I afraid?

She shifts again, moving onto her side. I press myself close to her, giving her one more embrace before getting out of bed. The monorail whispers past, the rain patters against the window. Heliostats in the ceiling unfold like flower petals, turning night into day. In a few minutes, the train’s passengers will see sunlight streaming down from the sky. At the next stop, they’ll be met by the bustling activity of the lunchtime crowd heading back to work.

Life here is perfect. No crime, no death, no sickness. So unlike the rest of the solar system. We didn’t find heaven. We made it. My unborn daughter would grow up surrounded by wonder and delight, able to be whatever she wanted to be. And she’d never grow old and frail like her grandfather. We’d live forever, the perfect family.

I shudder, pour myself a cup of coffee from the printer. Then: her footsteps. A hand on my bare shoulder. She says, “Come back to bed.” I tell her I can’t stop thinking about the future. She says not to worry. It’ll arrive in its own time, whether we like it to or not.

“Just come to bed. Don’t worry. Get some sleep.” And I stop worrying, just like that.

Suddenly, I am very tired. And I don’t remember what was keeping me awake.

The king is chosen through a ritual called the First Kill.

To both kingdoms are born princes. Both princes are raised as nobles and are given the same lessons, the same training.

They are treated as equals, as brothers. They have no other siblings, no friends as close as each other.

The rite of the First Kill is to determine which of the two princess will inherit the throne. This is done through a duel with swords.

The winner of the fight is pre-determined. Whichever kingdom ruled in the last generation must lose the duel.

One prince is destined to be the victor. The other is destined to be a victim.

There is no shame in being the First Kill, just as there is no glory in murdering that young man. Power always comes with a price.

Time passes. The royal families gather to watch the rite unfold yet again.

The two boys are too young for this, but they must fight this duel to keep the peace.

The boys bow to one another, then draw their swords. Already, mourners wail for their lost prince.

They put on a perfect display of martial prowess. Cuts, thrusts, parries. All delivered with masterful precision and grace. Then, a bell chimes: Time for the ritual to end.

The prince looks at his opponent. He knows what he must do. The First Kill.

But these princes are brothers first. As the fatal blow is to be delivered, the prince stays his hand. He will not continue this tradition. They will both rule, as brothers.

He lowers his sword and extends his hand. The crowd gasps, the mourners are silent. The chime sounds again but the prince pays it no mind.

His brother grasps the hand of the prince and smiles, but his eyes fill with tears.

The bells chime. One prince is destined to be the victor. The other is destined to be a victim.

Power always comes with a price.

I approach Chiodo and watch him through the clear viewing port of his tank. He floats in a nutrient-rich bath in a zero-g  pod near the Hole. Massive, pale and rippling with folds of blubber, he doesn’t resemble a person so much as some kind of aquatic, atavistic hybrid. A creature pulled from the liquid past of human evolution, from amoeba to tool-user. I tap on the side of the plastic tank and he rolls over onto his back, his stunted limbs lifting him to the surface. He bobs up and down, sipping something from a foil packet.

“Dear dear,” he burbles, his double-trachea giving his voice a fluted tone, like some deep woodwind. He can eat and breathe at the same time. “Star-girl, so nice of you to come all the way in-ring.” He takes another sip. Some fruit-flavored beverage laced with vitamins and carbohydrate. The larger Blobbies are even farther in-ring, so immense that they forgo tanks and live in permanent free-fall. A weird fetish, to want to be such a size. But they don’t want for anything else. In a time where a perfect body is standard,  imperfection is a desirable commodity.

“Enjoying the new suits?” I climb up the side of his tank and sit on the edge, idly stirring the pale pink fluid with my fingertips. “Your guards look fierce.”

Chiodo wriggles in the water, pantomiming his pleasure in a whole-body expression. His face is so fat that it’s hard to read his features. He clucks his tongue. “So nice, so nice. That is quality handiwork. From your looms, yes?”

“Of course, I’m here on official MRCZ business…”

He lolls to one side, somewhat dismayed, than bobs over to me.

“What do you need?”

I squirt the information to his key and wait the microseconds for him to accept and process the information. Surveillance video and some other records. I fill him in while he peruses the information.

“A neo-purist MRCZ called Three Threads. They’re small-time, very nouveau, very avant garde. Deals exclusively in insect silk…the real stuff, not the analogs.”

Chiodo splashes himself with some of the pink fluid of his bath. His white skin is slick and shiny, like wet plastic. “Continue.”

“They ghosted our MRCZ. You can see the footage there, yeah? One of our looms is gone.”

The agent of Three Threads, some contract ghost, was liberating something in the video record. A box, small enough to carry in two hands without too much trouble.

“The problem is that our loom is proprietary. Three Threads means to disassemble it, re-engineer its design and sell the schematics to some corporate concerns back on Earth for some data. Their MRCZ is so small that it’ll be a huge hit on their flow but I think they mean to boost their flow with barter of that data.”

The guard approaches the ladder to the tank and barks something to Chiodo. The Blobbie ducks down beneath the surface and sinks down to a monitor bank affixed to the far wall of the tank. When he emerges from the surface, his eyes were on me, glinting with possibility.

“Ah, so Henneman/Kartis should make them a better offer and return the loom to you?”

I shrug. It’s the best idea I have and Chiodo can be trusted.

“Why not gift the schematics yourselves? Surely your own MRCZ could use the flow. Or trade them for some data of your own?”

I already thought of that possibility. “Sure, Henneman/Kartis can broker the deal but  then our cache goes down once the parasites on Earth start mass-producing our designs. I’d rather keep our designs on the Donut and keep our flow in the positives, thanks.”

Chiodo drops his drink packet into a recycle bin and rolls over onto his back. His chubby, stunted arms are crossed over his belly, like a sea otter.

“We’ll get your machine back from the neo-purists and return it to you. In exchange, you will produce a new design, agreed?”

I bow and give the tank water a playful slap. “Thank you, Chiodo. As usual, we owe you one.”

He claps the water with his hand and sends up a splash. “As usual.”

Far below, a sea of black, chrome and blue. The flow.

Her fingers were skeletal in the dim-light. He watched their shimmering, delicate machinery. Her eyes were as clear as polished diamonds and he could see the circuitry working behind the mask of her skin.  The lovers, the pair.

The server approached, quiet like a ghost. “Sir, will there be anything else?”

The man set his napkin down to the right side of his plate. Across the table, his companion smiled. She was a vision in gauzy print-silk. Her place setting was bare, the glass of wine remained half-full.

“Desert? Coffee? Tea? Chemzymes?”

The lovers, fingers intertwined. smiled at one another.

“Thank you, that will be all.”

They left the dining MRCZ and took the lift down ten floors to a waiting shuttle. From there, perhaps some dancing and nightlife. Perhaps more.

She was a Quiet-Girl, the newest version of a long and storied line of artificial companions. Lenore. She never spoke, never needed to say a word. He paid for her silence.

Lenore took information like a rose drinks water, always seeking more, blooming, then withering and fading away. Soon, she would return to her makers. They’d bleed her for data, acquire some user feedback, mine her logs and thin slice her stack traces for bugs. Then she would die, to be reborn, reprogrammed, recycled. This time as a Katherine, or an Isabel, or a Reiko, or an Anita. But this moment just a triptych of data on someone’s key.

A history of an affair but out of context, just a line of 0′s and 1′s.

The romance is over. The passion is gone.

An array of heliostats reflects sunbeams from the Big Mirror through louvered windows to light up the station’s interior. Nobody born on Earth would ever confuse it with natural light, but it had a serene beauty to it. Like everything else, it was piped in from somewhere else to bring life to this lifeless place. Carnivale thinks of this and nothing else. Fostering life where there is no life. He says that there is a spirit in each building, one meant to inhabit each building. He says we must wait until the spirit finds its place, settles in and makes itself at home. We roll our eyes and tell him to do what he must, that we’ll wait while the spirit moves in. Once he gives his blessing, we open the building to the public. The residents move in, the building comes to life. No apparition can make this happen. It is a place for human beings. For life.

He’s an old man now. And he’s waiting inside his building, waiting for it to be possessed by the spirits. His body is wracked by age and the mishaps that come with it. His arm is a mass of wire and cable and artificial muscle. Pressoreceptors register sensation but pain, heat and cold are vague notions. These are not things; these are the memory of things, the ghosts of things half-remembered by the flesh. Carnivale’s hair is long and white, his eyes are pale and clear. The right one is scarred by two transplant operations. His left was lost to some extinct disease many years ago. A polished plastic ball spins in its socket, not quite as realistic as the latest mobs but good enough to pass casual inspection. Carnivale does not care for the aesthetics of his own form. He works more and more, he sleeps less and less. And when not working or sleeping or eating (which he does only when he must), he walks these empty halls, communing with unseen forces.

When I ping him he does not answer so I must make the long journey to the upper observation deck, some thirty meters from the lobby. It’s then that I see him, his long hair blowing in the recirculated air.

“Sir?” He does not turn around, his gaze fixed on some distant landmark.

“Sir?” And now he holds up his hand to me.

“Yes?”

I approach at a deliberate pace, unnerved by the gentle sway of the building’s structure.

“Sir, the building is ready to be occupied. Have you – are you done with your preparations?”

I see Carnivale’s shoulders slump in resignation. He nods and turns to face me. For whatever reason, he let himself get old. Someone hinted that he is a Singularist, preferring repair and replacement over renewal. I understand only that he comes from a different time. For me, the decision would be simple. But then, I am a much more simple man than Carnivale.

“Alberto. Do you know why I come to this place?” His voice is very quiet.

I tell him that I do not. I do not wish to ridicule his beliefs. He pats me on the shoulder and we walk back to lift. “A benediction,” he says, “to bless this place and make it whole.” I remain silent as he unlocks the lift’s controls and we descend to the ground level.

“Now that the flesh is whole, its requires blood.”

We exit the lobby into Venus Gardens. A crowd gathers to watch the opening of Talos Tower. An educational group waits for a tour, children running around while some teachers try to corral them back into lines.

He gestures to the crowd. “Here. The life force.”

I look up at the tower and I see it for what it is. Not a cruel spike or a lifeless mechanical thing. The starlight reflects off its polished mirror surface, distorted by the curved glass. The light streaks across it and as we turn, the windows sparkle as if holding back the whole of the galaxy. This building twists up from the ground, not down into it. It sends its roots down into the station and shoots up into the sky, seeking light and heat and warmth and life. Bringing life to a lifeless place.

When I find myself shaking he places a gnarled hand on my shoulder. There’s wetness on my cheek and the world is full of laughing children.

It wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always like this. Alone, I mean.

I was riding high back in the older, better days. A member of a high-powered, high flow MRCZ called the Memejackers. We thought we were oh so fierce. We rented space in a bubble building in a trendy part of the zone, a honeycombed network of foamcrete and plastic suspended from a steel truss. Thick cables stretched from the superstructure and the bubble-like apartments hung down them, like barnacles clinging to wood pilings. Ours was a two-bubble job, one housed our office and the other held the lab. We made memories. That’s what we advertised on the Aggregate’s registry, anyway. What we said. Our public face. What we did, what everyone knew we did, well…that was another story.

A client would schedule an appointment through one of our members. At that point in the game we had about two dozen staff on hand. That’s what we called ourselves: staff. Like a real corporation, the kind they still have offmarket. Jakob was the founder and he always dressed the part of the killer CEO. He was a scummy immigrant from a lunar colony. Split after some bad stuff went down. He pooled, borrowed or stole what he could to make the trip across the stars to the ringed planet and took up residence on the station as a political fugitive. That was what they stamped on his immigration record. After that, he was like all of us: a new person, a self-made man.

In Richmond’s case, that was a literal statement. Richmond was a blank, a human printed up like a replacement organ. He was printed at six years old and was now twenty one apparent. We were planning to throw him a birthday party when an explosion ripped through the bubbles. We heard metal shearing and bubbles tearing free from their cabling. I remember smoke and a lot of blood. The whole place went crazy and within no time at all the sweeps started buzzing around, collecting data for the emergency bots now en-route.

I staggered through a tear in the side of the labs and stepped over an arm. It was Richmond’s. His barely conscious body was lying under a pile of shredded cables, their ends frayed like old shoelaces. Rich was in rough shape and his mouth was screaming. I realized that I couldn’t hear anything and the buzzing I heard wasn’t the sound of the sweeps. It was vibrations bumping up against my blown-out inner ear. I pinged Richmond’s biometrics and saw them failing fast. I had the bare minimum of medical training, nothing to prepare me for this kind of trauma so I just waited by his body. A silver and blue sweep clambered in and asked me something. I squirted him the answer as it was faster than talking. The sweep sprayed some kind of blue foam on Richmond’s shoulder, where the meat ended in blood and bones and exposed muscle fibers. He stopped screaming and squirming and with the sweep’s assistance we freed him from the cables.

I pinged the other members of my group. Richmond was critical but now stabilized thanks to the foam tourniquet. They’d pump some plasma back into him and he’d be fine while they printed up a new arm. Jakob was dead, caught in the epicenter of the blast. With luck, he’d be back within a week or two. I just worried about his last dub. Ramping him back up to speed would take awhile.

Gedde and Armando were somewhere else. I pinged them with a status report and we planned our next move while the bubbles were evacuated. The fire was out but the damage made the whole structure unstable.

“Who would do this?” I asked Gedde and he pinged back one word:

“Vulterror.”

“No way,” I said aloud. “Vulterror is just a face cult. They don’t really do this kind of stuff.”

Gedde gave me a look that said more than words. Armando’s voice came into the conversation. “I just got confirmation from Hani and Illysa. And they have it on video.”

He squirted the short clip to me. Two people, male and female apparent, all done up in the Vulterror colors. They were setting up some equipment in the bubble next to our offices.

“How did they get this?”

Armando shrugged virtually. “Hani had some ghost tech set up in the area. I guess he was more than a little paranoid. Maybe Jakob told him to do it? Anyway, there it is.”

Vulterror was a wetworks outfit. Merchant muscle. But they had a reputation as a face cult; a group that made themselves look scarier than they were. Granted, Vulterror were some gruesome freemers but this had the stink of a hit. Not their style at all. I checked out their members’ flow on the Aggregate’s registry and saw that many of them were edging baseline.

Whatever they’d been contracted to do, it had pushed them into the positives.

Or they weren’t done with the deal yet.

I pinged a transport drone and climbed aboard.

“The rumor mill says it was a hit on Jakob orchestrated by AP on behalf of some other flood/bleeder group.” Armando’s voice in my head as the drone weaved through crowds of freemers.

That was the thing. Another flood/bleeding group. On the outside, we presented a small but successful group of ephemerists and data brokers. But Jakob got too ambitious and now we were marked for extermination. It wasn’t easy to slice data and sift through it for good memories. Cheaper and easier (for us) to snatch people from the Hole and bleed them dry of interesting data. It was my job to fish the fresh meat. To put on a friendly face and offer a hand out to the newbies. It sounded like a great plan. Snatch the newbie, bleed the data (including the experience of being grabbed) and they’d wake up in bed with not a clue what happened. As long as we weren’t caught, there was no way to trace it.

Memejackers. I forget who came up with the name but we were learning to regret the choice. Jakob thought he was so clever. Now he was being swept up into a dustpan and converted into landfill or something.

“Pull over!” I yelled at the drone, forgetting to use my key. It obeyed the command and swerved to the side. Jakob was flagging me down. “Shove.” he said and he climbed on beside me. The drone sped off, bobbing under the weight of two passengers.

Jakob grinned at me. “Hey, I have a place just outside the stacks. There’s a friend of mine waiting for us.” His voice was muted, like hearing someone speak while underwater.

My jaw hung open, staring at my very real, very intact MRCZ-mate. I pointed to my ears and pinged him. “Can’t hear too well.”

His reply: “My switcher friend.”

The lights came on. Identity switching was a big deal on the station. Hacking into the station’s neural net and playing shell games with key ID’s was a strict no-no. I pinged Jakob and saw his status: alive, well and cruising along.

“Who got caught in the explosion?”

He shrugged. “You’d have to ask the switcher. She persuaded the target to stop by the office to pick up a gift just as the Vulterror goons showed. Things transpired the way you remember and here we are.” He pulled out a shiny green apple from his pocket and bit into it. I was still in a daze.

“Richmond’s on his way to medical.”

Jakob shrugged and took another bite from his apple. “Hmm.”

The trip didn’t last much longer than that. We exited the drone and went up to his friend’s apartment. Her name was Jun. She was pretty, but not in a bioengineered way – that kind of planned beauty a lot of freemers had. And she was incredibly rich with flow. Stepping into the apartment was strange. Housing in the stacks were comfortable but tiny. This stretched out across a third of the floor plan. Bigger than Memejackers’ entire complex.

“Anyone else here?” asked Jakob. Jun shook her head no and retrieved some drinks for us. I staggered in, dizzy at the turn of events. My ears were still ringing but I could hear a bit better. No aural interfaces in my immediate future.

Jun said no and went back to whatever she was doing before we got there. We stayed in the main room, a rich carpet and comfortable chairs spread out in a sunken area in the center. On the wall, a space reserved for widescreen video layering. Jakob poured himself another drink while I collapsed in a plush love seat.

“What now?”

Jakob gulped down the drink. “Well, we gather the troops and strike back.”

“And Richmond? The others?”

Jakob twirled the ice in his glass with a finger and sat down beside me. “Rich will be fine. The mobbers will print up an even better arm for him. And nobody else was there except you and…me.” His eyes widened a bit and he gave me a spooky grin and a thumb’s up.

“So, strike back.”

“Yeah. We’ll hire Vulterror to raid their offices and lay some serious harm on them. I’ve already set it up.”

I defriended him right then and there and quit the MRCZ. “I’ll see myself out.”

The flow hit wasn’t too serious. It would be worse once people found out what Jakob had pulled and what the ‘Jackers really did to earn flow. I got a few frownies from other Memejackers but I only replied to those I trusted. Hani and his clique defriended me, having sided with Jake. No doubt he had fished them his own side of the story. Richmond was still off in surgery. I left him a message on his key. He’d get it as soon as he was turned back on.

The video feed of the hit was a nice bit of data I gifted to Vulterror who (probably) expunged it. I used the proceeds to fish the relay’s datastream and seed the newsfeed with a rumor about Jakob and the Memejackers’ snatch n’ bleed operation. Now that the truth was out there, I waited for the offers to come in.

They never did. Those who fell in with Jake stopped dealing with me and everyone else lumped me in with him and the rest of the crew. Richmond was back with a shiny new replacement arm and a sleeve full of painkillers but never replied to my message. My friends list was down to the barest dregs, immigrants that still weren’t privy to the scam and didn’t know what I did to them in the past.

I have all this data on a chip now. Pulled out of my head and set on infinite loop on a view screen. I see it all unfold before my eyes but I don’t remember it happening to me. As far as I can tell, it didn’t. I won’t sell it, even though I could use the data to trade for a better life. As far as I can tell, this is the life I want. This is the life I deserve. I traded it all away, pushed the reset button and moved on.

I remember a sunrise off the coast of Maine in the middle of the worst blizzard since 1978. I think about that morning and I smile to myself as I stroke the neck of a cooing dove. It flutters up into the air and circles the rooftop a few times before it returns to the covey’s roof. I watch it for awhile and lay back, thinking of the past and wondering where it went.

The old adage is that you can’t buy happiness.

Not true. You can buy happiness. The problem is that you can’t sell off regret.