Alissa Kharon. A talented scientist who’d died in an idiotic lab fire.

It wasn’t her—obviously—but the eyes, the cheeks, the nose: the face was almost exactly the same.

It was a man a little younger than she had been when she died, taller, but with the same coloring, the same expression.

Haunted.

Her son.

“Neil,” said Rubeo loudly. “Neil Kharon.”

He strode toward the stairs. The young man stared at him, confused.

“Neil Kharon. I’m Ray Rubeo. Do you remember me?”

“Uh, uh, yeah.” The young man stuttered, then glanced awkwardly at the hand Rubeo thrust toward him.

“Your mother worked for me at Dreamland, back in the nineties. Do you remember me? I sent you an e-mail when you graduated from MIT. I know it’s been years?”

Rubeo had done more than that. He had written a recommendation to help Kharon into a doctorate program in Europe—surreptitiously, with the help of the young man’s teachers at MIT. He’d actually hoped to steer him to Stanford, though there was really no arguing about Cambridge.

Rubeo had lost track after that. It was a shame—the young man was brilliant, every bit as smart as his mother.

“What are you doing in Sicily?” Rubeo asked.

“I’m here—I was supposed to interview for a position at VGNet.”

“With Rudd?” Rubeo touched his right ear, squeezing the post—an ancient habit, especially when holding his tongue.

Armain Rudd, who owned the company, had the ethical standards of a slug, and treated his employees little better than slaves. VGNet was active in the artificial intelligence field, handling cognitive interfaces—basically helping sensors “talk” to brains. Its work was solid, but not anywhere near as advanced or as interesting as Rubeo’s work.

Surely young Kharon could do better than that.

“You’re looking for a job?” Rubeo said. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

“I—”

“Give me your contact information.”

“Uh—”

“Forget what you’ve told them, or they’ve told you. They’re not to be trusted anyway. We will easily meet their offer. Really, Neil, I’m disappointed you didn’t think of us. You’ll be a good fit for us—we have a lot of interesting projects. Tell me about your interests.”

“I, uh, well—”

“You have a date tonight?”

“I was actually meeting, uh, a young lady,” stuttered Kharon.

“Naturally. Unfortunately, I’m going to Africa tomorrow. Wait.” Rubeo took out his wallet and retrieved a business card. It was a bit worn at the edges; he couldn’t remember the last time he actually gave one out.

“Here,” he told Kharon, handing him the card. “You are to send me an e-mail. Or call that number at the bottom. Call as soon as you get back to your room tonight. There’ll be a secretary. Make an appointment.”

Kharon took the card.

“The secretary may be a computer,” added Rubeo. “Or maybe not. See if it passes the Turing Test.”

Kharon shoved the card in his pocket and walked toward the lounge. His cheeks were burning; he felt unbalanced, small and weak. It was as if he was trapped again, back in the closet.

He went to the bar and ordered a beer. He took it from the bartender’s hand and practically drained it, still feeling pressed in on all sides.

Undone by a chance meeting? What kind of coward are you?

What kind of sissy weakling are you?

You should have shot him dead right there. Killed the bodyguard, too.

He hadn’t brought his gun. That was just one of his many mistakes.

“Are you all right?” asked the bartender in Italian.

“Bene, bene.” Kharon raised his head and looked at the bartender. Then he glanced at the bottle—it was nearly empty. “Un altro, per favore,” he said stiffly. “Please. Another.”

The bartender smiled. “A woman, eh?”

“Yes. My mother.”

“Ahhh,” said the bartender knowingly. He went and got the beer. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said, placing the bottle on the counter.

In a way, the man had drawn exactly the right conclusions, Kharon thought. He was still grieving.

Upstairs, Rubeo left Levon Jons and went into his room, checking the security first with his bug detector. The device mapped the room’s electrical circuitry, and was sensitive enough to detect even the NSA’s latest generation of nanopowered “flies”—a certification Rubeo was sure of since his company had worked on the technology employed in the microsized listening gear.

The room was clean. Rubeo sat down in the large chair opposite the television and turned the set on, flipping to the U.S. news stations.

Alissa Kharon’s son working for VGNet. Good God!

The news program detailed a shake-up in the Libyan government’s ruling body. A group of alleged moderates had taken over.

Since when did moderates take anything over? Rubeo wondered.

He changed the channel. CNN was carrying a discussion program. The host introduced a speech from a member of the Iranian government saying the American plane that had bombed the village was the spawn of the devil.

“I’m sure you’re an expert on that,” spat Rubeo.

He sat back on the bed, mind drifting. He thought of Alissa Kharon. He’d had a crush on her. She probably didn’t even know. He’d certainly never acted on it: She was married and, though he was her supervisor, a few years older than he was.

Pretty woman. And very smart.

He closed his eyes and heard the alarms, smelled the fire, the aftermath. Alissa had died from suffocation in the lab bunker. The laser system she was working on had malfunctioned, and rather than leaving, she’d tried to put out the fire—a classic mistake, but like her in a way, insisting that she could shut down the systems and prevent more damage.

Rubeo knew exactly what she must have thought—all that work they’d done about to be ruined. The laser was connected to a hand-built targeting system that the team had spent two years perfecting. She had jumped from her station and run to it as the others began to leave.

The bunker had been equipped with a state-of-the-art fire suppression system. But state of the art in the early 1990s wasn’t quite good enough to kill the chemical fire the laser unit spawned. The doors locked, and for some reason no one realized that she was still inside.

Rubeo, working upstairs on something else, distracted as he always was then, arrived to find one of her assistants screaming frantically.

“Where’s Alissa?” she’d yelled. “Where’s Alissa?”

He overrode the system, but when they opened the doors they were met with a wall of black smoke. He had to close the doors—he closed them himself, knowing she was already dead, lost somewhere behind the smoke.

The hazmat team arrived a few seconds later. Rubeo went and got himself a suit, and went in after them.

Her body, badly burned, was back near the unit. The main AI unit lay inches from her outstretched hand.

She was a beautiful woman, and smart, with a kid and a husband. The husband dissolved after her death. He died of cancer a year later, but he’d been a broken man, unable to pull himself back together.

By then the assistant who had screamed had committed suicide.

Not because of Alissa’s death, or so the investigators said—she had marital problems, which were prominently mentioned in the note she left. But Rubeo remembered the last line of the suicide note:

I will see Alissa for you all.

So much pain. So much success and achievements, and all he could think of was the pain.

Rubeo glanced at the television. The talking heads were pontificating about the dangers of drones and the inevitability of “disasters.”

“What about the decline in collateral damage brought on by smart weapons?” Rubeo asked the screen. “What about the ability to empirically correct problems in the machines, unlike intractable human error?”

He flipped the television off.