Note to self. Noodge Igor, who must know what the fuck this is all about. Scribbled illegibly on a virtual Post-it, stuck on a little-frequented brain lobe it presently falls off of, but there for marginal nagging value at least.

A flamboyance of French maids, street hookers, and baby dominatrices, none of then in junior high yet, comes jittering up the stairs. “Look! What’d I tell you?”

“OhmyGod?”

“Eeew, creepy?”

Misha and Grisha beam, puts their hands on their hearts, and bow slightly. “Tha tso kalan yee?”

“Tha jumat ta zey?”

Sending the young ladies into rewind, all in a frenzy, back down the stairs, Misha and Grisha calling genially after them, “Wa alaikum u ssalam!”

“That’s Hebrew?” sez Maxine.

“Pashto. Wishing them peace, also how old are you, do you go to mosque regularly.”

“Here come my kids.”

Ziggy’s Empire State Building outfit has acquired spray-painted graffiti, and somebody has slipped a miniature souvenir Red Sox cap onto King Kong’s head. Otis’s hair is still defiantly vertical, and like the gent he is, he’s schlepping Fiona’s bag along with his own.

“Fiona, nice getup, help me out, you’re supposed to be—”

“Misty?”

“The girl in Pokémon. And this is—”

Fiona’s friend Imba, who’s got up as Misty’s chronically bummed-out companion Psyduck.

“We flipped for it,” Fiona sez.

“Misty’s a gym leader,” Imba explains, “but she has impatience issues. Psyduck has powers, but such unhappiness.” Synchronized, she and Fiona grab the sides of their heads like S. Z. Sakall and utter the characteristic “Psy, psy, psy.” It occurs to Maxine that Psyduck, though Japanese, could be Jewish.

“Good evening, Tech Support, how may I abuse you?” Justin has come tonight as Dilbert’s power-freak dog, Dogbert, wearing indigo shades instead of clear lenses. Maxine introduces everybody.

“You are the Justin McElmo?” First time Maxine has heard either of these goons say “the.”

“Don’t know, there’s probably more of em out there.”

“Of DeepArcher,” Grisha amplifies.

“Just a couple of Game Boy fans,” Maxine mutters.

“You guys have been down there? Since how long?” Justin not alarmed so much as curious.

“Since 11 September maybe? Before then, was much harder to hack in. Then suddenly, day of attack, gets easier. Later, gets impossible again.”

“But you’re still getting in.”

“Can’t stay away!”

“Pizdatchye,” kvells Grisha, “always some new story, new graphics, different each time.”

“Everything evolving,” Misha sez. “Tell us, Justin. Did you design it that way?”

“To evolve?” Justin looking surprised. “No, it was only supposed to be the one thing, like, timeless? A refuge. History-free is what Lucas and I were hoping for. Now you guys are seeing, what?”

“Usual govno,” sez Grisha. “Politics, markets, expeditions, asskicking.”

“Not gamer scenarios, you understand. Down there we cannot be gamers, we must be travelers.”

A good enough basis to exchange business cards.

Just before moving on to further shenanigans, the torpedoes draw Maxine aside. “DeepArcher—you know it too. You’ve been there.”

“Um,” nothing to lose, “see, it’s only, like, code?”

“No! Maxine, no!” with what could be either naïve faith or raving insanity, “it’s real place!”

“It is asylum, no matter, you can be poorest, no home, lowest of jailbirds, obizhenka, condemned to die—”

“Dead—”

“DeepArcher will always take you in, keep you safe.”

“Lester,” Grisha whispers, eyes angling upstairs toward the pool, “Lester’s soul. You understand? Stingers on roof. That.” A head gesture out into the All Saints night, toward far downtown where the Trade Center used to stand, past the invisible swarming hundreds of thousands of masked celebrants in streets lighted and semi-lit, out to the reeking hole with the Cold War name at the lower edge of the island.

Maxine nods, pretending to see what she can’t see. “Thank you. Go easy, guys.” She collects Ziggy and Otis, who are already scarfing down Teuscher truffles like they’re Hershey Kisses, and they make their way out the forbidding portals of The Deseret and homeward.

“Top of the evening to yese,” calls Patrick McTiernan.

Yeah and where was all that leprechaun jive when she could’ve used it.

Horst is still awake, now watching Anthony Hopkins in The Mikhail Baryshnikov Story, intensely absorbed, a spoonful of Urban Jumble ice cream poised a foot away from his mouth and dribbling onto his shoe.

“Dad, Dad! Snap out of it!”

“Will you look at this,” blinks Horst. “Ol’ Hannibal dancin up a storm here.”

•   •   •

AFTER HER HALLOWE’EN ANTHRO EXPEDITION, Heidi has come back a changed person. “Children of all ages enacting the comprehensive pop-cultural moment. Everything collapsed into the single present tense, all in parallel. Mimesis and enactment.” She may’ve been having a little incoherence after a while. Nowhere did she see a perfect copy of anything. Not even people who said, “Oh, I’m just going as myself” were authentic replicas of themselves.

“It’s depressing. I thought Comic-Con was peculiar, but this was Truth. Everything out there just a mouseclick away. Imitation is no longer possible. Hallowe’en is over. I never thought people could get too wised up. What’ll happen to us all?”

“And because you tend to be a blamer . . .”

“Oh I blame the fuckin Internet. No question.”

•   •   •

THE PHONE CALL TO IGOR isn’t one she’ s looking forward to. Whatever the karmic balance is outstanding between him and Gabriel Ice, she was deliberately avoiding it till Misha and Grisha, noodges from beyond the daytime envelope she would much rather keep inside, made this impossible anymore. Plus which, the happy torpedoes have now it seems been stalking hashslingrz for hidden reasons, and it probably behooves her to find out what, though she isn’t expecting much in the way of details.

Igor is chirpy. Too chirpy. Acting like he’s been waiting for this call forever.

“Look, Igor, it’s not as if anybody is paying me to find out who did Lester—”

“You know who did it. So do I. Cops will not act. It becomes matter of . . .” Is he trying to get her to say it?

“Justice.”

“Restoration.”

“He’s dead. What’s to restore?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I would indeed. Especially if it’s KGB business and you and your posse are embedded assets.”

A silence she has to categorize as amused. “They don’t say KGB anymore, they say FSB, they say SVU. Since Putin, KGB means old guys in government.”

“Whatever. Ice was deep into funding anti-jihadists. Russia has its own Islamic issues. Is it so crazy to imagine the two countries cooperating? Getting upset when Lester started collecting unauthorized bonuses?”

“Maxine. No. It wasn’t only because of money.”

“Excuse me? What then?”

He waits a fraction of a beat too long. “Lester saw too much.”

She tries to remember that last time she and Lester talked, in Eternal September. There must have been a tell she missed, a lapse, something. “If he understood what he was seeing, wouldn’t he have told somebody?”

“He tried to. He called me on my mobile. Night before they got him. I couldn’t pick up. Left long message on voice mail.”

“He had your mobile number.”

“Everybody does. Cost of doing business.”

“What was the message?”

“Pretty crazy shit. Black Escalades trying to run him off LIE. Phone calls to wife, threats to kids. Me, my people, he thought we might have connections. Help broker some understanding.”

“As in . . . ?”

“He forgets about what he saw, they don’t kill him. Good luck.”

“And what he saw . . . ?”

“He was crazy by then. They already had his sanity. They didn’t have to kill him. One more thing which must be restored. You want secular cause and effect, but here, I’m sorry, is where it all goes off books. Lester said, ‘Only choice I have left is DeepArcher.’ I heard about DeepArcher site from padonki, so I have rough idea what it means, but not what he’s talking about.”