Robert Paglino had set me up with Chelsea in the first place. Maybe he felt responsible when the relationship started jumping the rails. Or maybe Chelsea, Madam Fix-It that she was, had approached him for an intervention. For whatever reason, it was obvious the moment we took our seats at QuBit's that his invitation had not been entirely social.

He went for some neurotrope cocktail on the rocks. I stuck with Rickard's.

"Still old-school," Pag said.

"Still into foreplay," I observed.

"That obvious, huh?" He took a sip. "That'll teach me to try the subtle approach with a professional jargonaut."

"Jargonaut's got nothing to do with it. You wouldn't have fooled a border collie." Truth be told, Pag's topology never really told me much that I didn't already know. I never really had much of an edge in reading him. Maybe we just knew each other too well.

"So," he said, "spill."

"Nothing to spill. She just got to know the real me."

"That is bad."

"What'd she tell you?"

"Me? Nothing at all."

I gave him a look over the top of my glass.

He sighed. "She knows you're cheating on her."

"I'm what?"

"Cheating. With the skin."

"It's based on her!"

"But it isn't her."

"No it isn't. It doesn't fart or fight or break into tears every time you don't want to be dragged off to meet its family. Look, I love the woman dearly, but come on. When was the last time you tried first-person fucking?"

"Seventy-four," he said.

"You're kidding." I'd have guessed never.

"Did some third-world medical missionary work between gigs. They still bump and grind in Texas." Pag swigged his trope. "Actually, I thought it was alright."

"The novelty wears off."

"Evidently."

"And it's not like I'm doing anything unusual here, Pag. She's the one with the kink. And it's not just the sex. She keeps asking about—she keeps wanting to know things."

"Like what?"

"Irrelevant stuff. My life as a kid. My family. Nobody's fucking business."

"She's just taking an interest. Not everyone considers childhood memories off-limits, you know."

"Thanks for the insight." As if people had never taken an interest before. As if Helen hadn't taken an interest when she went through my drawers and filtered my mail and followed me from room to room, asking the drapes and the furniture why I was always so sullen and withdrawn. She'd taken such an interest that she wouldn't let me out the door until I confided in her. At twelve I'd been stupid enough to throw myself on her mercy, It's personal, Mom. I'd just rather not talk about it. Then I'd made my escape into the bathroom when she demanded to know if it was trouble online, trouble at school, was it a girl, was it a—a boy, what was it and why couldn't I just trust my own mother, don't I know I can trust her with anything? I waited out the persistent knocking and the insistent concerned voice through the door and the final, grudging silence that followed. I waited until I was absolutely sure she'd gone away, I waited for five fucking hours before I came out and there she was, arms folded in the hall, eyes brimming with reproach and disappointment. That night she took the lock off the bathroom door because family should never shut each other out. Still taking an interest.

"Siri," Pag said quietly.

I slowed my breathing, tried again: "She doesn't just want to talk about family. She wants to meet them. She keeps trying to drag me to meet hers. I thought I was hooking up with Chelsea, you know, nobody ever told me I'd have to share airspace with…"

"You do it?"

"Once." Reaching, grasping things, feigning acceptance, feigning friendship. "It was great, if you like being ritually pawed by a bunch of play-acting strangers who can't stand the sight of you and don't have the guts to admit it."

Pag shrugged, unsympathetic. "Sounds like typical old-school family. You're a synthesist, man. You deal with way wonkier dynamics than that."

"I deal with other people's information. I don't vomit my own personal life into the public sphere. Whatever hybrids and the constructs I work with, they don't—"

— touch—

"Interrogate," I finished.

"You knew Chelse was an old-fashioned girl right off the top."

"Yeah, when it suits her." I gulped ale. "But she's cutting-edge when she's got a splicer in her hand. Which isn't to say that her strategies couldn't use some work."

"Strategies."

It's not a strategy, for God's sake! Can't you see I'm hurting? I'm on the fucking floor, Siri, I'm curled up in a ball because I'm hurting so much and all you can do is criticize my tactics? What do I have to do, slash my goddamn wrists?

I'd shrugged and turned away. Nature's trick.

"She cries," I said now. "High blood-lactate levels, makes it easy for her. It's just chemistry but she holds it up like it was some kind of IOU."

Pag pursed his lips. "Doesn't mean it's an act."

"Everything's an act. Everything's strategy. You know that." I snorted. "And she's miffed because I base a skin on her?"

"I don't think it's so much the actual skin as the fact that you didn't tell her. You know how she feels about honesty in relationships."

"Sure. She doesn't want any."

He looked at me.

"Give me some credit, Pag. You think I should tell her that sometimes the sight of her makes me shudder?"

The system called Robert Paglino sat quietly, and sipped his drugs, and set the things he was about to say in order. He took a breath.

"I can't believe you could be so fucking dumb," he said.

"Yeah? Enlighten me."

"Of course she wants you to tell her you only have eyes for her, you love her pores and her morning breath, and why stop at one tweak how about ten. But that doesn't mean she wants you to lie, you idiot. She wants all that stuff to be true. And—well, why can't it be?"

"It isn't," I said.

"Jesus, Siri. People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think." He took a breath, and another hit. "And you already know that, or you couldn't do your job. Or at least—" He grimaced— "the system knows."

"The system."

Me and my protocols, he meant. My Chinese Room.

I took a breath. "It doesn't work with everyone, you know."

"So I've noticed. Can't read systems you're too entangled with, right? Observer effect."

I shrugged.

"Just as well," he said. "I don't think I'd like you all that much in that room of yours."

It came out before I could stop it: "Chelse says she'd prefer a real one."

He raised his eyebrows. "Real what?"

"Chinese Room. She says it would have better comprehension."

The Qube murmured and clattered around us for a few moments.

"I can see why she'd say that," Pag said at last. "But you— you did okay, Pod-man."

"I dunno."

He nodded, emphatic. "You know what they say about the road less traveled? Well, you carved your own road. I don't know why. It's like learning calligraphy using your toes, you know? Or proprioceptive polyneuropathy. It's amazing you can do it at all; it's mindboggling that you actually got good at it."

I squinted at him. "Proprio—"

"There used to be people without any sense of—well, of themselves, physically. They couldn't feel their bodies in space, had no idea how their own limbs were arranged or even if they had limbs. Some of them said they felt pithed. Disembodied. They'd send a motor signal to the hand and just have to take it on faith that it arrived. So they'd use vision to compensate; they couldn't feel where the hand was so they'd look at it while it moved, use sight as a substitute for the normal force-feedback you and I take for granted. They could walk, if they kept their eyes focused on their legs and concentrated on every step. They'd get pretty good at it. But even after years of practice, if you distracted them in mid-step they'd go over like a beanstalk without a counterweight."