Already the program had retrieved most of the file; the torso, arms, and one leg had been sewn together, and the other leg was complete down to the ankle. Only one foot and the head remained unaccounted for…

The medics pushed in through the tent flap, carrying the missing foot on the stretcher. Just as they had before, the surgeons shouted and beckoned the smart frames over to the operating table. They readied their clamps and needles, bent over the body…

The operating room lights went out.

"Drek!" Uncertain what had happened, Red Wraith fumbled around in the sudden darkness. He found the operating table by feel and pushed past the surgeons, who were frozen in place. Even as he shouldered a way through them he felt them dissolve. At the same time the sides of the tent began to fold up into the tent ceiling like Venetian blinds, revealing the glowing streaks of tracer bullets cutting through the thick, dark night and letting in the sound of gunfire. The MASH program was shutting down! And his personnel file was still incomplete. But even though key parts of it were missing, the copy of it that lay partially assembled on the operating table might very well be the only copy that would ever be available to him…

Red Wraith did the only thing he could think of. He activated his evaluate utility, which he had previously programmed to search for any text that contained Lydia's name. Then he dove onto the table, letting his own wraith-like body merge with the naked corpse in an effort to read the file. It was a creepy feeling; the body was already starting to dissolve into individual pixels. Red Wraith could literally feel himself crumbling to pieces…

Data streamed through his mind. »NAME: DANIEL GEORGE BOGDANOVICH »D.O.B.: 03/10/2019 »RANK: CAPTAIN, UCAS ARMED FORCES »TRADE: ADMIN CLERK

Red Wraith laughed out loud at that one. An administration clerk was a paper-pusher. The only thing Daniel Bogdanovich had ever "administered" was a lethal injection. »ENLISTED: 12/23/2038 »DISCHARGED: 05/13/2052

Red Wraith laughed grimly a second time. Discharged? "Killed in action by friendly fire" would have been more accurate. At least he wasn't listed as being given a dishonorable discharge. Lydia would still be entitled to his military service pension. »CURRENT ADDRESS: UNKNOWN »MARITAL STATUS AT TIME OF DISCHARGE: SINGLE »NEXT OF KIN: NONE »SERVICE RECOR The data suddenly stopped scrolling through Red Wraith's consciousness as the operating table below him also vanished. He drifted now above a shell-pocked battlefield that was crisscrossed with the glowing trails of tracer bullets-the UCAS SEACOM system and its datastreams, edited by the Al to match the central metaphor of this pocket universe. The personnel file had lost cohesion, had broken apart entirely as the MASH utility completed its shutdown. It was gone.

A pathologist in a bloodstained white lab coat appeared in the air beside Red Wraith. The evaluate utility handed him an autopsy report. Red Wraith scanned it quickly, his anxiety growing as he read its text. The utility hadn't found the keyword "Lydia" in his personnel file a single time. Not once. She wasn't listed anywhere as Red Wraith's common-law spouse or next of kin.

Red Wraith released the autopsy and watched both it and the pathologist disappear-along with his hope. Would the UCAS military have deliberately deleted any mention of Lydia from his file, in order to protect her? Or-and the thought sent a shiver of dread through him- had she died long ago, been erased from his personnel file? Had the memory of her death been wiped from his mind, just as the memory of his previous missions had?

Then an even more chilling thought occurred to him. Perhaps he had been wrong about everything.

Had he ever had a wife or girlfriend named Lydia? Or had the memory of her not been Daniel's at all, but that of one of his targets? The last chip he'd slotted into the data-soft link in his skull had contained the personal data of his final target: the Greek minister of finance whose throat Daniel had slashed. Had Lydia been his wife?

But then why had Daniel been carrying Lydia's holopic with him the day his UCAS handlers tried to slag him with the cranial bomb? A month had passed between his last assassination, which he'd carried out in Greece, and the detonation of the cranial bomb at the back of his skull. Why had he taken a holopic that would incriminate him, carrying it all the way to Amsterdam? Lydia had to have been someone he cared about. Didn't she?

There was one way to find out, but he wondered if he was too much of a coward to try it. Back in the sensory deprivation tank, when he was scanning the psychotropic conditioning programs and quickly surfing through the synopses of several of them, he'd noticed one that was intended to treat cyberpsychosis-induced amnesia. Could it also repair the gaps in his memory that the datasoft link had deliberately created?

He didn't like the thought of placing his wetware in the hands of untested technology-particularly a copy of a decades-old experimental software program. But what the hell. He was already trapped inside the Matrix with a crazed Al, cut off from his meat bod, and about to go down with that Al when it crashed. If the last seven years of ef fort really had been all for nothing, then he had nothing left to lose.

Subject Daniel George Bogdanovich reacts to the icon with a mixture of involuntary physiological responses. Heart rate and perspiration have increased, and blood flow and muscle contraction in the groin indicates a strong*sexual response.* At the same time, the subject experiences a variety of emotions: 'love* for the icon,*pain* at the realization that the female human represented by the icon is no longer accessible, and*happiness* that she is no longer accessible.

"Lydia!"

She sat across the table from him, holding a bitter espresso that had been sweetened with a generous spoonful of sugar. For the first time, they were meeting without "chaperones." At Daniel's insistence, Lydia Riis had ditched the two bodyguards that normally accompanied her everywhere, and had come to the cafe alone. Sweet-smelling hash smoke curled through the air overhead, and the voices of the other customers in the tiny cafe were a blend of Dutch, English, and German.

The holopic of herself that she'd just given him lay forgotten on the table between them.

Lydia had deliberately dressed down and was wearing baggy hemp-fiber pants and a white tank top that showed off her tan. Her long auburn hair was tucked under a white beret. She worked out regularly and had an athlete's body to show for it, with long legs, narrow waist, and small breasts. Her green eyes stared at him over her Vashon Island sunglasses, which she'd let slide down her nose, with a mixture of shock and mistrust. It was the same look she'd given him when he'd told her he loved her and wanted to marry her-and that he'd come to the cafe to kill her.

Except that this wasn't really Lydia.