Dr. Hanta answers from behind me as I turn round to look at her. "Memory is encoded in a number of ways, as differential weightings in synaptic connections and also as connections between different nerves. The last excision and redaction you underwent was faulty. You began to experience breakthrough. In turn, that was triggering alerts in your enhanced immune system, and then you got yourself exposed to a mechanocytic infestation, which made things much worse. Whenever new associative traces would start integrating, your endogenous robophages would decide it was a mechanocyte signal and kill the nerve cells. You were well on your way to losing the ability to form new long-term associative traces—progressive brain damage. The fixative is normally used as the last step in redactive editing. I used it to renormalize, erase, the old memories that were breaking through. I'm sorry, but you won't be able to access them now—you keep those that you've already integrated, but the others are gone for good."

Sam has loosened his grip on me, and I lean against him as I stare at the doctor. "Did I give you permission to mess with my mind?" I ask.

Hanta just looks at me.

"Did I?" I echo myself. I feel aghast. If she did it against my will, that's —

"Yes," says Sam.

"What?"

"She—you were pretty far gone." He hunches over again. "She was describing the situation to you, and me, and I was asking her to do it, and she said she couldn't—then you were delirious. You began mumbling and she asked you, and you said yes."

"But I don't remember . . ." I stop. I think I do remember, sort of. But I can't be sure, can I? "Oh."

I stare at Hanta. I recognize the expression in her eyes. I stare at her for a long time—then I manage to make myself nod, just a quick jerk really, but it's enough to break contact, and I think we all breathe out simultaneously. Meanwhile I'm thinking, Shit, I'll never be able to figure out where I've come from now, will I? But it's not as bad as what was going to happen otherwise. I don't remember the attacks, exactly, but I remember what happened between them, the consequences—it's a consistent story. A new story of my life, I suppose. "I feel much better," I say cautiously.

Sam laughs, and there's a raw edge in it that borders on hysteria. "You feel better?" He hugs me again, and I hug him right back. Hanta is smiling, with what I think is relief at a difficult situation resolved. The suspicious paranoid corner of me files it away for future reference, but even my secret-agent self is willing to concede that Hanta might actually be what she seems, an ethically orthodox practitioner with only the best interests of her patients at heart. Which is a big improvement on Fiore or the Bishop, but at least one out of three isn't bad.

"So when can I go home?" I ask expectantly.

IT turns out that I'm stuck in hospital for the rest of the day and the next night, too. Hospital life is tedious, punctuated by the white-clad ghosts wheeling around trolleys of food and different things, instruments and dark age potions.

I still ache from the fever, and I feel weak, but I'm well enough to get up and go to the bathroom on my own. On my way back I notice that the curtains around the other occupied bed on the ward are drawn back. I glance around, but there are no nurses present. Steeling myself, I approach.

It is Cass, and she's a mess. Her legs are encased in bright blue polymer tubes from toe to thigh, and raised by wires so that the bedding dangles across her in a kind of valley. The bruises on her face have faded to an ugly green and yellow except around her eye sockets, which look simultaneously puffy and hollow, her eyelids sagging closed. She's still thin, and a translucent bag full of fluid is slowly draining into her wrist through a pipe.

"Cass?" I say softly.

Her eyes open and roll toward me. "Guuh," she says.

"What?" She flinches slightly. I hear footsteps behind me. "Are you all right?"

The nursing zombie approaches. "Please step away from the patient. Please step away from the patient."

"How is she?" I demand. "What have you done to her?"

"Please step away from the patient," says the nurse, then a different reflex triggers: "All questions should be addressed to medical authorities. Thank you for your compliance. Go back to bed."

"Cass—" I try a last time. Gross memory surgery falls through my mind like a snowflake, freezing everything it touches. I feel awful. "Are you there, Cass?"

"Go back to bed," says the nurse, a touch threateningly.

"I'm going, I'm going," I say, and I shuffle away from poor, damaged Cass. Cass who I thought was Kay, obsessing over her, when all the time Kay was sleeping in the next room, and Cass was living in a nightmare.

I have a problem with the ethics here, I think. Hanta's not bad. But she collaborates with Fiore and Yourdon. What kind of person would do that? I shake my head, wincing at the cognitive dissonance. One who'd perform illegal memory surgery then implant the recollection of giving informed consent in the victim's mind? I shake my head again. I don't really think Hanta would do that, but I can't be sure. If the patient agrees with the practitioner afterward, is it really abuse?

IT'S a bright, sunny Thursday morning when Hanta comes and sits by my bedside with a clipboard. "Well!" Her smile is fresh and approving. "You've done really well, Reeve. A splendid recovery. I think you're about well enough to go home." She uses her pen to scribble an annotation on her board. "You're still convalescent, so I advise you to take it very easy for the next few days—certainly you shouldn't go back to work until this time next week at the earliest, and ideally not until the Monday afterward. Take this note and give it to Janis when you return to work, it's a certificate of exemption from employment. If you feel at all unwell, or have another dizzy spell, I want you to telephone the hospital immediately, and we'll send an ambulance for you."

"Will the ambulance be much use if I'm incoherent or hallucinating?" I ask doubtfully.

Hanta shoves an unruly lock of hair back into place: "We're still populating the polity," she says. "The paramedics aren't due to arrive until next week. They have to have additional skill set upgrades to their implants. But in two weeks' time if you call an ambulance or see a nurse or need a police officer, you won't be dealing with a zombie." She glances along the ward. "Can't happen soon enough, if you ask me."

"I was meaning to ask . . ." I trail off, unsure how to raise the subject, but Dr. Hanta knows what I'm talking about.

"You did the right thing when you called the ambulance," she says firmly. "Never doubt that." She touches my arm for emphasis. "But zombies are no use for nonroutine circumstances." A little sigh. "It'll be much easier when I have human assistants who can learn on the job."

"How big is the polity going to grow?" I ask. "The original briefing said something about ten cohorts of ten, but if you're going to have police and ambulance crews, surely that's not enough?"

She looks surprised. "No, a hundred participants is just the size of the comparison set for score renormalization, Reeve, a single parish. We introduce participants to each other in a controlled manner, ten cohorts to a parish, but you're nearly all settled in now. Next week is when we open the manifold and link all the neighborhoods together. That's when YFH-Polity actually comes into existence! It's going to be quite exciting—you're going to meet strangers, and there'll be far fewer zombies."

"Wow," I say, my voice hollow and my head spinning. "How many, uh, neighborhoods, are you planning to link in?"

"Oh, thirty or so parishes. That's enough to form one small city, which is about the minimum for a stable society, according to our models."