Also, be honest, I said to myself. You’re the establishment. She’s the radical.

And that was true enough. Through my father and his activities, I was in the physical world more than most young Hadens. Cassandra Bell, on the other hand, was never in it, other than by reputation.

I set aside Cassandra Bell for a moment and went back to Jay Kearney, who had blown himself up on Karl Baer’s behalf. A scroll through his client list confirmed, as Vann had said, that Baer was indeed a client of Kearney’s, with three appointments in twenty-one months. The last of these was eleven months ago. According to Kearney’s appointment notes, they went parasailing.

But aside from brief notes on the nature of their appointments, there was nothing apparently connecting the two that I could see. Three appointments in two years was evidence of a prior relationship, but it wasn’t much of a relationship.

The FBI had gotten warrants for every scrap of Baer’s and Kearney’s lives the instant it was clear they had done the bombing. I reached into that data trove to pull out messages and payment records. I wanted to see how much cross talk there was between them, either in personal correspondence or in a financial trail of crumbs that suggested that the two of them interacted in any significant way.

There was very little. The messages clustered around integration appointments and discussed things like potential activities, how much Kearney would charge for his time, and other pedestrian affairs. Likewise, their financial records coincided at integration appointments only, when Baer would pay Kearney for the appointment.

This lack of a trail didn’t mean that the two of them didn’t meet or plan the bombing. It only suggested that if they did, they weren’t idiots about it. But it didn’t seem a lot to go on.

I stopped and looked up, and stepped back from the wall of images and searches I had constructed, looking for the structure in it, and in the connections. I imagine to a lot of people it would look like complete chaos, a mess of pictures and scraps of news.

I found it calming. Here was everything I knew so far. It was all connected in one way or another. I could see the connections out here in a way I couldn’t see them when they were jumbled in my brain.

Next steps, I heard Vann say in my head. I smiled at it.

One. There were two nexuses of interaction that I saw. One was Lucas Hubbard, to whom Nicholas Bell, Sam Schwartz, and my father connected, and with whom Jim Buchold argued on a matter related to their mutual business.

The other was Cassandra Bell, to whom Nicolas Bell, Baer, and Kearney were connected, whom Buchold was antagonistic toward, and Hubbard, possibly, based on his argument with Buchold, was sympathetic toward.

So: Dive into both, particularly Cassandra Bell. She was the only person in all of this whom I had not physically met. Arrange an interview if at all possible.

Two. Baer and Kearney: Still unconvinced about the connection here. Dig deeper.

Three. Johnny Sani. Find out what he was doing in Duarte and if anyone knew him there. Learn if there was a connection between him and the City of Hope.

Four. Two outliers in this tangle: My dad and Brenda Rees. I was pretty certain my dad was not up to no good, running for senator notwithstanding. In any event I had a massive conflict of interest if I wanted to investigate him.

As for Brenda Rees, might as well get an interview with her and see if she had anything useful to say.

Five. Nicholas Bell. Who said he was working when he met with Sani, but also appeared to have been there to integrate with Sani, even though it was impossible, because they were both Integrators and because the headset was fake.

So what the hell was really going on in there?

And why did Johnny Sani commit suicide?

Those were the two things that taking all these data points out of my brain and spreading them out into space didn’t make any clearer.

Chapter Thirteen

A LIGHT PING ECHOED through my cave. I recognized the tone as a noninvasive hail, a call that would be delivered if the recipient was conscious, but not if not. Hadens, like anyone else, hated to be woken up by random calls in the middle of the night. I pulled up a window to see who it was. It was Tony.

I cleared the call, audio only. “You’re up late,” I said.

“Deadline on a gig,” Tony replied. “I had a hunch you might have been lying when you said you wanted to sleep.”

“I wasn’t lying,” I said. “I just couldn’t sleep.”

“What are you doing instead?”

“Trying to figure out a whole bunch of shit that unfortunately I can’t tell you much about. And you?”

“At the moment, compiling code. Which I can tell you about but which I don’t imagine you care about,” Tony said.

“Nonsense,” I said. “I am endlessly fascinated.”

“I’ll take that as a challenge,” Tony said, and then the data panel popped up a button. “That’s a door code. Come on over.”

Tony was offering me an invite to his liminal space, or at very least a public area of it.

I hesitated for a second. Most Hadens were protective of their personal spaces. Tony was offering me an intimacy of sorts. I hadn’t known him that long.

But then I decided I was overthinking it and touched the button. It expanded into a doorframe and I stepped through.

Tony’s workspace looked like a high-walled retro video game cube, all black space with the walls defined by neon blue lines, off of which branched geometric patterns.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” I said. “You’re a Tron fan.”

“Got it in one,” Tony said. He was at a standing desk, above which a neon-lined keyboard hovered. Beside that was a floating screen with code, with a toolbar slowly pulsing, marking the amount of time until Tony’s code compiled. Above him, rotating slowly, was a swirl of lines, apparently haphazardly connected.

I recognized them immediately.

“A neural network,” I said.

“Also got that in one,” Tony said. His self-image was, like most people’s, a version of his physical self, fitter, more toned, and stylishly clothed. “If you really want to impress me, you’ll tell me the make and model.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I admitted.

“Amateur,” Tony said, lightly. “It’s a Santa Ana Systems DaVinci, Model Seven. It’s their latest-released iteration. I’m coding a software patch to it.”

“Should I be seeing any of this?” I asked, pointing at the code in the display. “I would guess this is all supposed to be confidential.”

“It is,” Tony said. “But you don’t look like much of a coder to me—no offense—and I’m willing to guess that the DaVinci up there looks mostly like artfully arranged spaghetti to you.”

“That it does.”

“Then we’re fine,” Tony said. “And anyway it’s not like you can record anything in here.” Which was true. In personal liminal spaces, visitor recording was turned off by default.

I looked up at the model of the neural network hovering over Tony’s head. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” I said.

“Neural networks in general, or the DaVinci Seven in particular?” Tony asked. “Because confidentially speaking the D7s are a pain in the ass. Their architecture is kind of screwy.”

“I meant in general,” I said, and looked up again. “The fact we’ve got one of these sitting in our skulls.”

“Not just in our skulls,” Tony said. “In our brains. Actually in them, sampling neural activity a couple thousand times a second. Once they’re in, you can’t get them out. Your brain ends up adapting to them, you know. If you tried to remove it, you’d end up crippling yourself. More than we already are.”

“That’s a cheerful thought.”

“If you want really cheerful thoughts, you should worry about the software,” Tony said. “It governs how the networks run, and it’s all really just one kludge after another.” He pointed at his code. “The last software update Santa Ana put out accidentally caused the gallbladder to get overstimulated in about a half a percent of the operators.”