"So this is obviously your current hot spot? Vampires?"

"Pod, vampires are the capital-Hot spot for anyone with a 'neuro' in their c.v. I'm just doing a couple of histology papers. Pattern-matching receptors, Mexican-hat arrays, reward/irrelevance filters. The eyes, basically."

"Right." I hesitated. "Those kind of throw you."

"No shit." Pag nodded knowingly. "That tap lucidum of theirs, that shine. Scary." He shook his head, impressed all over again at the recollection.

"You've never met one," I surmised.

"What, in the flesh? I'd give my left ball. Why?"

"It's not the shine. It's the—" I groped for a word that fit— "The attitude, maybe."

"Yeah," he said after a bit. "I guess sometimes you've just gotta be there, huh? Which is why I envy you, Pod-man."

"You shouldn't."

"I should. Even if you never meet whoever sent the 'Flies, you're in for one Christly research opportunity with that—Sarasti, is it?"

"Wasted on me. The only neuro in my file's under medical history."

He laughed. "Anyway, like I said, I just saw your name in the headlines and I figured, hey, the man's leaving in a couple of months, I should probably stop waiting around for him to call."

It had been over two years. "I didn't think I'd get through. I thought you'd shitlisted me."

"Nah. Never." He looked down, though, and fell silent.

"But you should have called her," he said at last.

"I know."

"She was dying. You should've—"

"There wasn't time."

He let the lie sit there for a while.

"Anyway," he said at last. "I just wanted to wish you luck." Which wasn't exactly true either.

"Thanks. I appreciate that."

"Kick their alien asses. If aliens have asses."

"There's five of us, Pag. Nine if you count the backups. We're not exactly an army."

"Just an expression, fellow mammal. Bury the hatchet. Damn the torpedoes. Soothe the serpent."

Raise the white flag, I thought.

"I guess you're busy," he said, "I'll—"

"Look, you want to get together? In airspace? I haven't been to QuBit's in a while."

"Love to, Pod. Unfortunately I'm in Mankoya. Splice'n'dice workshop."

"What, you mean physically?"

"Cutting-edge research. Old-school habits."

"Too bad."

"Anyway, I'll let you go. Just wanted, you know—"

"Thanks," I said again.

"So, you know. Bye," Robert Paglino told me. Which was, when you got down to it, the reason he'd called.

He wasn't expecting another chance.

Pag blamed me for the way it had ended with Chelsea. Fair enough. I blamed him for the way it began.

He'd gone into neuroeconomics at least partly because his childhood buddy had turned into a pod person before his eyes. I'd ended up in Synthesis for roughly the same reason. Our paths had diverged, and we didn't see each other in the flesh all that often; but two decades after I'd brutalized a handful of children on his behalf, Robert Paglino was still my best and only friend.

"You need to seriously thaw out," he told me, "And I know just the lady to handle the oven mitts."

"That is perhaps the worst use of metaphor in the history of human language," I said.

"Seriously, Pod. She'll be good for you. A, a counterbalance—ease you a bit closer to the comfy mean, you know?"

"No, Pag, I don't. What is she, another neuroeconomist?"

"Neuroaestheticist," he said.

"There's still a market for those?" I couldn't imagine how; why pay to tweak your compatibility with some significant other, when significant others themselves were so out of fashion?

"Not much of one," Pag admitted. "Fact is, she's pretty much retired. But she's still got the tools, my man. Very thigmotactic. Likes all her relationships face-to-face and in the flesh."

"I dunno, Pag. Sounds like work."

"Not like your work. She's got to be easier than the bleeding composites you front for. She's smart, she's sexy, and she's nicely inside the standard deev except for the personal contact thing. Which is not so much outright perversion as charming fetish. In your case it could even be therapeutic."

"If I wanted therapy I'd see a therapist."

"She does a bit of that too, actually."

"Yeah?" And then, despite myself, "Any good?"

He looked me up and down. "No one's that good. That's not what this is. I just figured you two would click. Chelse is one of the few who might not be completely put off by your intimacy issues."

"Everyone's got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn't noticed." He must have; the population had been dropping for decades.

"I was being euphemistic. I meant your aversion to general Human contact."

"Making it euphemistic to call you Human?"

He grinned. "Different deal. We got history."

"No thanks."

"Too late. She's already en route to the appointed place."

"Appoin—you're an asshole, Pag."

"The tightest."

Which was how I found myself intrusively face-to-face in an airspace lounge south of Beth and Bear. The lighting was low and indirect, creeping from under seats and the edges of tables; the chromatics, this afternoon at least, were defiantly longwave. It was a place where baselines could pretend to see in infrared.

So I pretended for a moment, assessing the woman in the corner booth: gangly and glorious, half-a-dozen ethnicities coexisting peacefully with no single voice dominant. Something glowed on her cheek, a faint emerald staccato against the ambient red shift. Her hair floated in a diffuse ebony cloud about her head; as I neared I caught occasional glints of metal within that nimbus, the threads of a static generator purveying the illusion of weightlessness. In normal light her blood-red skin would doubtless shift down to the fashionable butterscotch of the unrepentant mongrel.

She was attractive, but so was everyone in this kind of light; the longer the wavelength, the softer the focus. There's a reason fuckcubbies don't come with fluorescent lights.

You will not fall for this, I told myself.

"Chelsea," she said. Her little finger rested on one of the table's inset trickle-chargers. "Former neuroaestheticist, presently a parasite on the Body Economic thanks to genes and machines on the cutting edge."

The glow on her cheek flapped bright lazy wings: a tattoo, a bioluminescent butterfly.

"Siri," I said. "Freelance synthesist, indentured servant to the genes and machines that turned you into a parasite."

She waved at the empty seat. I took it, assessing the system before me, sizing up the best approach for a fast yet diplomatic disconnect. The set of her shoulders told me she enjoyed lightscapes, and was embarrassed to admit it. Monahan was her favorite artist. She thought herself a natural girl because she'd stayed on chemical libidinals all these years, even though a synaptic edit would have been simpler. She revelled in her own inconsistency: a woman whose professional machinery edited thought itself, yet mistrustful of the dehumanising impact of telephones. Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her.

She liked what she saw when looked at me. She was a little afraid of that, too.

Chelsea gestured at my side of the table. The touchpads there glowed soft, dissonant sapphire in the bloody light, like a set of splayed fingerprints. "Good dope here. Extra hydroxyl on the ring, or something."

Assembly-line neuropharm doesn't do much for me; it's optimized for people with more meat in their heads. I fingered one of the pads for appearances, and barely felt the tingle.

"So. A Synthesist. Explaining the Incomprehensible to the Indifferent."

I smiled on cue. "More like bridging the gap between the people who make the breakthroughs and the people who take the credit for them."