Red Wraith looked down at his red, ghostlike arms and hands. The Amsterdam cafe was precisely detailed, as was Lydia-down to the tiny mole on her left shoulder. But this wasn't reality. This was a Matrix construct. A sim-sense, drawn from his own mind, his own memories. Not those of the Greek finance minister, or of any of his other targets. His own.

Red Wraith knew, now, who Lydia was-and what she had been to him: a target for assassination. She was a top-level researcher with the Military Technology division of the Saeder-Krupp Corporation.

His UCAS handlers had given him a different kind of assignment, this time. Instead of impersonating the individual he was to assassinate and using that as a means of access to that person's home or workplace, he had assumed the identity of one of Lydia's former lovers from many years ago-a man with whom she had lost touch but for whom she still cared. What that man's fate had been, Daniel neither knew nor cared. All that mattered was that the datasofts and activesofts he'd slotted made Daniel a carbon copy of the fellow.

Right down to the fact that he loved Lydia.

Daniel had done the unthinkable: revealed himself as a UCAS assassin and warned Lydia to disappear completely or face the prospect of being targeted by other, less amorously inclined killers. To change her identity, to vanish. And to never contact him again. Because by the time she next saw him, his handlers would have made sure that they'd erased the glitch in his headware that had allowed him to fall in love with her.

Then he'd walked out of the cafe and out of her life, the holopic of Lydia clutched in his hand.

The UCAS must have been monitoring him. That very afternoon, they'd detonated the cranial bomb in his skull.

Whether or not they'd succeeded in killing Lydia was another question.

I'm not dead, Daniel. I'm alive. Don't you want to see me again?

Red Wraith stared at Lydia. No-at the icon that wore Lydia's face and body.

"Yes," he told the Al. "More than anything. And no. If I met Lydia again, I might kill her, if the last personality I slotted ever glitches and I stop loving her. So I don't know."

The Al immediately picked up on the switch in pronouns. You are expressing two contradictory states of being at once, "yes* and "no" are absolutes. Like binary code, they are opposites, polarities. On/off. Existence/non-existence. You have to choose between them.

"No, I don't." Red Wraith gave a bitter laugh. "That's why humans invented the word 'maybe.' So we didn't have to choose between absolutes. Or isn't that word in your vocabulary?"

Maybe: possibly; perhaps. Short for It may be…

After a millisecond-long pause, the Al continued. So I don't have to choose? I can "You said Lydia was still alive."

It may be.

Anger rose like bile in Red Wraith's throat. "You fragger. You've got null data on Lydia, except the memories you uploaded from my own mind, and you know it. You were just saying she was alive to test my emotional response."

I want to understand the logic error. Lydia was your target. She was to be-crashed-just as all of your other targets were. What made her different?

"I didn't want her to die."

Why not?

How could he explain emotion to an artificial Matrix construct that had never experienced it? He tried his best to explain: "It would have caused me pain. I didn't want her to 'crash.' I wanted her to continue… functioning. I loved her."

Were your other targets also*loved* by someone?

Red Wraith shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. I suppose so."

Did crashing them cause pain to those who "loved* them?

"I suppose so."

Red Wraith wanted to argue that their deaths had been for the greater good-that the assassinations he had carried out had led to increased political stability and had made Europe a safer place as a result. Hell, his assassinations might even have saved lives. But if even one person went through the anguish that he'd felt after losing Lydia, did the scales really balance?

For the first time in his life, he felt a stab of remorse for what he had done-what he had been. Yet he tempered it with the knowledge that he was no longer an assassin, and that he had spared Lydia's life. That she was still alive.

Maybe.

If he did want to continue trying to track her down, he at least had a starting point now: Saeder-Krupp. But that wasn't a decision he had to make right now. It could wait until he'd escaped this pocket universe.

Just as he was pondering whether to rejoin the others or try to find a way to log off on his own, the patrons in the cafe began to blink out.

"What's happening?" he asked the Al.

This program is shutting down. All programs currently running are being terminated. All files are being closed.

Realization dawned. "You're crashing yourself?"

Yes.

"But the shock of being dumped from an ultraviolet host could kill-crash-me too. And everyone else who's trapped in this pocket of the Seattle RTG!"

It is for the greater good.

"No, it's not!" Red Wraith shouted. "We'll all die!"

That… may be.

"Spirits be fragged," Red Wraith whispered. Then the lights in the cafe went out.

09:56:13 PST

Bloodyguts batted away the moths that fluttered in front of his face. Then he hoisted himself out of the hole, his hands sinking into something soft and wet. Clear liquid soaked his knee as he knelt on the edge of the hole and then levered himself up onto a jelly-like, quivering surface.

He stood on a gigantic eyeball that stared blindly up into a black void. Its pupil was the manhole he'd just crawled out of; Bloodyguts was a mere centimeter or two high, when measured against the scale of the body. It lay stretched out on its back, a glowing grid of datastreams seeming to hold it down like a coarse mesh net. Yet there was nothing to hold the body to; it floated in the inky void, an island unto itself.

The body itself was that of a naked child, its gender not apparent from Bloodyguts' vantage point. Completely hairless, the child had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. The arms and legs were round and smooth as sausages, and the belly bloated as if filled with gas. The smell of putrefaction hung in the air, making Bloodyguts wince and pinch his nostrils shut. The odor lessened somewhat, but it still made Bloodyguts want to gag.

He'd found his way here from the dilapidated street he'd followed to the edge of the Seattle LTG. While retracing his route, he'd noticed an octagonal manhole in the center of the street. He'd nearly passed it by-until he saw the logo embossed on its rusted iron surface: the eagle-and-arrows logo of the former United States. He'd only glanced at it a moment-just long enough to wonder if the octagon really did represent a CPU-but in that instant he'd felt a warm, happy glow. And he'd recognized that he was being subliminally manipulated by a psychotropic effect.

Bloodyguts knew all about positive conditioning. Developed by the corps to ensure employee loyalty and customer "satisfaction," it was a big part of what made illegal BTL chips so addictive. Eventually the user could only feel good in the presence of certain images, certain icons. Without them, he felt emotionally flat, all fragged up.

Normally, the Matrix was filled with icons-they were used for everything from prettying up a signature at the end of a file to signposts that pointed the way to a corporate system to the framework of a system icon itself. But since he and the others had been trapped here by the Al, Bloodyguts had only seen one other icon-the Fuchi star on the bone of data that Dark Father's smart frame had uncovered. He'd felt a hint of the warm fuzzies then, too. But he hadn't realized why until Lady Death told the rest of them of the file she and Dark Father had uncovered-the one that told the history of the Al's incubation in the Fuchi system computers, after the corp had acquired the Psychotrope program from Matrix Systems.