Recently in A Fire in Their Eyes Category

The lift lurched into motion like any office building elevator, but Crow felt the climb more in his stomach. Nerves. He told himself. The corridors through the window quickly gave way to the concrete interior of the gigantic shaft that made up the interior of the building. The rough and unfinished surface reminded Crow of the pebbled tongue of a lizard. "We're sliding down the gullet, except really we're sliding up it."

"Profound." Rebecca said. "We're about to become orbital vomit. You really have a way of alleviating a girl's acrophobia."

"What do spiders have to do with this?" Crow asked.

"Fear of heights numb-wit." Rebecca said.

"Spiders are afraid of heights?"

Rebecca snorted and tried to find a magazine to read.

"Okay." Crow said. "I got it, you're afraid of heights. Why?"

"Always have been." Rebecca said. "I get vertigo just looking at that Rockefeller Center photo."

"They say that every phobia has a basis in experience." Crow said. "That most people say they can't remember a basis for their phobia, but that's just because they repress the memory."

Broad glass sheets made the ceiling of the compartment translucent, and far above Crow could see a growing pinprick of light that he realized must be the end of the shaft. It grew quickly from a bright point into a dull patch of overcast sky, huge metal doors mounted to the sides of the opening. Crow for the first time noticed the cable itself running down to the center of the compartment, into a center mounted column that contained the gears and drive that climbed the cable like a tireless acrobat swinging hand by hand up an endless rope. More glass sheets lined the floor, but in more discrete corners and patches so that the curious could look without feeling the intense vertigo of standing on air. Crow was not afraid of heights, but stared anyway at those downwards windows with trepidation.

"It looks so thin." She muttered. "I mean, I understand the physics behind it more or less, but it's almost unbelievable to look at."

"It's only six inches wide at the base, if I recall." Crow said, craning his neck to stare as well. "But it has to be tapered, so it's almost six feet wide halfway up, before it shrinks back down again."

The marines walked them to a giant room bustling with activity, and left them with a technician who showed them to a pair of comfortable seats inside a cubicle next to an odd interior window that looked out on a corridor of personnel busy moving items around on fork lifts. The window and seats clicked for Rebecca first.

"My god, we're in the compartment right now." She said, Crow raised an eyebrow at her and she gestured wildly around. "We're in the elevator right now. This whole room goes up."

Crow whitened a little and stood up to look over the cubicle walls. The room was half the size of a football field, and rapidly filling with strap-secured straps and a few dozen sentis in addition to one or two other human passengers. "It really does look way too thin. I always thought of elevator more literally, like a little ten by ten compartment that goes up with bad music and fake wood paneling."

Rebecca flipped through a pamphlet tucked into a document holders mounted on the wall and shook her head. "The cable is anchored five hundred feet under the surface and the entire top of the building opens up to allow a hundred foot diameter storage car to pass." She held up a diagram to Crow. "We won't even be the only car, it says here that they run up to eight at a time, slinging them off the end up there as they come up."

Crow took his seat and busied himself reading a magazine he found in the same pocket as Rebecca's pamphlet. He snorted and tossed the magazine aside, acid welling up in his stomach at the memories it brought. It was the precise issue he had browsed a couple weeks ago in Dr. Anderson's office. When I still had a little boy.

A senti stewardess gave them the rundown of the lift procedures once the compartment had bee filled to the brim. Crow noticed that the other sentis did not pay her any attention and seemed particularly pre-occupied with themselves.

The result was that Los Angeles was the first city with a space port, the first interstellar city the city council preferred to say. They captured all of the élan of Roswell tourism and moved it down town. The space elevator itself had a sprawling base station in the museum district, right beside the La Brea tar pits. Some had wanted to put the station nearer to the docks for logistical reasons, but the magnitude of the expected tourism drew the station into a more metropolitan area of the city.

"Have you ever been up?" Rebecca asked in a low tone, eyes locked onto the glittering tower into the sky.

Crow shook his head. "No. Always wanted to, but never got an excuse good enough for someone else to pay."

"Green Eyes went up you know." Rebecca said, wistful. "The angel singing in heaven, or some such nonsense. He said it was beautiful, the earth was like the biggest jewel in the universe hanging underneath the station where he stayed."

"The sight of it probably makes you realize how narrow-minded we get down here on the ground, huh?" Crow asked. Rebecca shrugged.

Karros had a detachment of marines meet them with a hummer on the tarmac at El Toro, and drive them through the first stirrings of rush hour. The fresh-faced private at the wheel struggled with every shift of gears, drawing glares of ire from his sergeant in the passenger seat.

"First time driving a manual?" Crow asked to lighten the constricting military mood of the vehicle.

The private automatically looked to his sergeant who gave him permission to answer with a small motion of his head. "First time driving a car, sir." The private answered in a voice that verged on pubescent cracking. "I never got my license in high school and learned how to drive on a tank in the Sahara." He grinned. "Those drive a bit different."

Crow settled back in his sheet, suddenly feeling that the armed escort could not protect them from the most eminent safety problems confronting them. "I'll bet." He muttered.

A broad-based skyscraper tapered to a point almost half a kilometer above their heads, contorted like a piece of putty twisted around too many times. The cable of the space elevator stretched from the tip of the building up into the atmosphere. Crow noticed Rebecca breathing raggedly next to him.

"I'm the Prince of Wales!" Crow shouted to them. "Jolly-O!"

Two of them took pictures reluctantly before the hatch to the transport closed on them. A yeoman showed Rebecca and Crow to worn leather seats of surprising comfort near the cockpit and demonstrated the use of the seat belts. Crow stretched his legs out to their full length.

"I guess when they transport tanks in these things, they can afford to give you more leg room than the commercial ones, huh?" Crow asked.

"You're happy for a kidnap victim." Rebecca muttered and stared out the window at the bustle of enlisted men fueling the planes and running through maintenance checklists.

"We weren't kidnapped." Crow said. "We just rated an escort is all." He grunted. "I thought you'd be happy. We don't have to kidnap Green Eyes now."

"No." Rebecca said. "If he needs kidnapped, we'll be three hundred thousand miles away, and I doubt our cell phones will work from the moon."

A hundred miles from Los Angeles, they could see a strip of metal sparkling in the sunlight above the smog layer, which roiled underneath the plane in a thick yellow stew. A ribbon divided the sky like a crack in the glass of the windows, disappearing into the smog below and into the distance above, a gentle curve steering it also off to the horizon. The sheer size and length defied description, at least in part because the magnitude made it impossible to actually bring the strand into focus. It seemed like it must just be a sliver of metal caught on the window, a hair dropped down over their eyes.

The engineering community had protested for years the chosen site of the space elevator. It had to be along the equator, they insisted. Putting it in Los Angeles defied all engineering logic. Of course, any suitable engineering site along the equator defied all political logic as far as the government was concerned. In time, it was hashed out that placing the site farther north made the problem more difficult, not impossible, at which point a societal raised eyebrow and a sigh by the engineering community got the job done for three times the price of an equatorial model.

"Has payment been discussed?" Crow asked. "I don't recall."

Karros snorted. "Your lawsuits will have been dismissed by the end of day today, by which time you will be on a space station boarding a shuttle for the dark side of the moon."

"Are you familiar with the situation with my son?" Crow asked.

Karros shrugged. "The senti? Kidnapped by other sentis?"

A deep frown creased Crow's face. "The government gets him back for me, or I'm going back to my room and watching Law and Order reruns." He stopped in his tracks on the stairs, and one of the soldiers put a hand on his shoulder and Crow could feel the iron tension in the attached arm, waiting for a word from Karros.

Karros looked at him for a moment and then shrugged again. "Done. Washington wants the group responsible buried anyway." He pointed a finger at Crow and looked over his sunglasses. Crow saw that both eyes had been replaced with mil-spec cybernetic eyes that glowed a dull red and made his face take on a skull-like appearance. "I'm telling you though, that you might not want to come back from the moon after you see what we've got. If every single scientist we had up there hadn't said you were the guy to get, we could find a thousand other guys willing to kill to get up there."

"One more thing." Crow said. "I want Green Eyes released."

Karros shrugged, his favorite gesture. "No dice. That whole deal was put in a holding pattern this morning though. Congress doesn't know what the hell to do, and the district attorney isn't going to do anything without word from Washington."

Crow raised his hands in mock surrender. "Take me to your leader."

They boarded a military transport up at Moffett field, which had been closed for years but still had intact runway for emergency use into and out of the area. The hangers were the biggest in the world and a historical society had slapped preservation lawsuits on them, so the planes that were there had to park outside the concrete and steel monstrosities built in the middle of the Cold War for the very purpose of housing them. Crow waved at a cluster of tourists staring at him, Rebecca, and their military escort, apparently trying to figure out if they were personages worthy of snapping a picture or two.

"What project?" Crow asked. "I'm not doing that shit to Green Eyes that Stillwell tried, so you can just go back to Washington if that's the case."

"Not Green Eyes." Karros said, he glanced at Rebecca and at the cordon of guards. "We can't talk here."

Rebecca nodded. "That's wise. This rooftop is bugged."

"Who is she?" Karros asked Crow without looking at her. It was a question within a question. Can I ignore her, and if so make her leave. He was asking.

Crow straightened. "This is Ms. Calvin. She is my professional assistant."

"Secretary?" Karros said with derision, raising an eyebrow. Why are you wasting my time with a secretary? He was asking.

"Er, no." Crow fumbled. "Bad word choice, she has a doctorate in artificial intelligence and year of experience in the field. She is my protégé in that sense."

Karros seemed satisfied with that and motioned them to follow. "We need you in orbit, post haste." He began walking to the doors and Crow and Rebecca followed more by default than desire as the troops closed around them and moved as well, leaving them inside like a flying wedge. "Either of you ever been up in orbit?"

Both shook their heads and Karros shrugged. "Yes well, you're famous and all that Dr. Daedalus, I thought perhaps you had caught one of the tourist junks up to orbit at some point. Publicity, that sort of thing."

Crow shook his head again. "No, never had the luck. But what's this about?"

Karros let slip a fierce smile over his shoulder. "The kind of thing that would have given Stillwell an aneurysm if he hadn't taken a bullet instead. Something we found on the other side of the moon."

Crow waited for more details, but none were forthcoming, so he tried to see if he had any bargaining chips to his name. "And what do you need me for?"

The door opened and they began to descend the stairs in a hurry, two soldiers deploying in front of them to scout in an ingrained gesture of paranoia. "We'll get the elevator on the next floor, have the trucks pull up front." Karros ordered one of the uniforms to his side in a low voice. The man moved off a short distance and whispered the orders into the small mike embedded in his lip. Karros looked back at Crow. "Legal troubles aside, you are the authority on artificial intelligence. That is what we need now."

"What if we don't give him a choice?" Crow asked.

Rebecca laughed with a shrill caw that made the ravens glare at her for a moment before they resumed cataloging the detritus. "What are we going to, chloroform the robot? Taser the droid? How the hell do you knock out a senti anyway?"

"There are ways." Crow said, sounding much more confident than he felt. "I could rig up something in a couple of days if I needed to. But I think it would be simpler all around to just lie to him. He's very naïve you know. If we had a good enough story laid out, he'd believe it."

Rebecca blinked. "But that would be wrong." They both broke into unexpected laughter.

The heavy steel door of the roof creaked open behind them and a half dozen black uniformed men streamed out, rifles ready to protect the suit in their midst who wore one hell of an expensive Italian suit, along with unnecessary sunglasses and a silk tie that shimmered with some sort of metallic abstract design.

"Shit, I thought you were kidding about the bugs." Rebecca said.

"I was, sort of." Crow said, mystified. "But who'd have thunk they'd bug the entire roof of the hotel?"

"Maybe they stuck the bug in your clothes." Rebecca said. "Maybe it's in your underwear."

"Can't be that." Crow shook his head. "I never wear underwear. Mostly to avoid the risk of surveillance equipment."

The uniforms spread out around them in a canopy of gun cover, comfortingly pointed outwards this time, Crow was grateful to note. The suit strode up, glanced at Rebecca and then fixed on Crow. He did not bother to remove his sun glasses or offer a hand. "Dr. Daedalus?" He asked and went on without waiting for a response. "I'm Karros, Director of the FBI."

"Wait, I thought Stillwell was director?" Crow broke in.

"Director Stillwell committed suicide last week. And that's the only detail that is non-classified." Karros said. "I am interim director, and I have been sent to retrieve you for an immediate project."

"That was before." Crow said. "I got a call from one of the few people on the technologist side of things who will talk to me anymore, a guy over in Washington, and he told me things were looking really bad at the closed hearings."

"The senate hearing on Green Eyes?"

"Yeah." Crow said. "Word is the naturalist hard liners have three-fourths of the votes, and most of the rest don't care one way or the other. Nobody likes a machine getting uppity."

"How long?" Rebecca asked quietly. "How long before they do something?"

"Couple days." Crow said. "It's going to be a media circus one way or the other. This isn't the sort of thing they'll sweep under the rug. They'll go all out and wipe him right there inside the courthouse. That is, if they just wipe him. They might scrap heap him after all the trouble."

"That's bullshit!" Rebecca said. "They said they'd wipe him at least, put him back where he was before. I mean, if he's just a machine like they say, then punishing him like a criminal is against everything they're saying." She was starting to cry. "Can't they even follow their own fucking principles?"

Crow set an uncomfortable hand on her shoulder, hesitated, and then drew her close in a hug he hoped helped a little. "He's a symbol now. Symbols get held up or burned down, they don't get the straight and narrow treatment."

Rebecca sobbed and collapsed onto Crow, who grunted in surprise and pulled away at first and the tucked her close. He made inarticulate noises intended to comfort and a darkness blurred his eyes as he recalled that the last time he had done such a thing was over a scraped knee of Alexander a month ago. After a few moments she pulled away and rubbed hard at her eyes, apparently trying to will away the residue of the outburst.

"But the bright side is that he might be willing to run now." Crow suggested gently. "If staying doesn't accomplish the effect, there's no reason not to run is there?"

Rebecca snorted and seemed to consider crying again before venting the excess emotion into anger instead. "Bastard wants to be a martyr. He'll probably give them tips on how to hang the rope to look better for the cameras when the lynching comes. 'Sometimes it takes a great injustice to mobilize the righteous.' That's the type of crap he spouts at me whenever we get talking about it. He's too dense to get that dead is dead, whether it's just or not."

Chapter Twenty-One - Departures

A cold wind blew across the crowns of San Francisco's skyscrapers, cutting like a blade through trench coats and sweaters alike. Crow and Rebecca stood on the top deck of the Hilton, nursing steaming coffees and shivering against the wind. A swimming pool nestled between ornamental boulders behind them, a design idea of an out-of-town architect who thought that all of California was sunny and warm. Ravens lighted between the boulders, picking at the debris of last night's cultured cocktail party. Corners of bread, crumbs of cheese, a missing ear ring or two, the birds picked the roof cleaner than the janitors could manage.

Crow watched a ferry meander across the bay and noticed that it had also caught Rebecca's eye. He gestured to it. "Ever been on one of the ferries?" Meaningless conversation, it was the glue that held together social gatherings even of only two people.

Rebecca shrugged. "I think I went to Alcatraz when I was little, but other than that, no. I'm not from around here remember, I grew up in Nebraska."

"They must have loved the mods there." Crow said. "Was it teenage rebellion against the heartland at first? Did your mom wonder why you couldn't have just gotten a tattoo like every other dumb drunk kid?"

Rebecca didn't smile, studied the ferry. "It was an internment camp in everything but name. They kept the families and children of cyborgs close. They never trusted any of us."

"Sorry." Crow said quietly.

A silence fell over the roof and Crow took the time to study his coffee intently, counting the bubbles clinging to the surface. Rebecca broke the silence after a few minutes with false cheer.

"So is there a reason we're freezing our asses off up here instead of being somewhere civilized with heaters?" Rebecca asked.

Crow shrugged and smiled. "I think my room's bugged."

Rebecca raised an eyebrow and smirked. "Little full of yourself aren't you?"

"It's less depressing than low self esteem." Crow said. He slushed his coffee around in slow circles, until a whirlpool's edges touched the rim of the paper cup. "What do you say we get Green Eyes out?"

"He won't go for it." Rebecca said without hesitation and then blushed slightly. "You were there the first time I went for it and he hasn't budged a bit. He can be quite stubborn."

"Does information not matter at all then?" Alexander asked suddenly after an hour of thought. "Is thought the only thing that matters?"

"Not at all." Sed said. "Unless it produces information, the mind is nothing. As a crutch, information is useless, but as a ladder it allows you to stand on the shoulders of giants. You need not re-derive the double helix unless the process itself is enlightening. You can use the ideas discovered and expressed by others to advance your own thought. Read Hamlet again - read it word by word, don't just scan it into memory - and you may find refinements to truths that you did not know existed. Ponder on the shifting reality of Dali and you might intuit connections you never before suspected. All the works of science and art are there to be tapped for inspiration. New and original thoughts tie in to the infinite array of culture like a thousand strands of a spider web. Nothing really stands completely on its own."

Alexander thought he understood and he lost himself for days in a storm of thought and slow pondering. Awk watched from the shadows on occasion but was shoed away by Sed whenever noticed. Alexander looked up suddenly on the sixth day, and found Sed still standing there. Tears trickled down Alexander's face.

"I think we should leave." Alexander said. "I don't want to leave my dad, but I don't think we belong here, and I don't think that there can ever be peace between our peoples, at least not a peace that is just. There can only be peace between equals. I think we should find our own home, where we can build our own world."

Awk stepped into the room and his eternal smile seemed more pronounced than ever, while Sed's frown seemed to grow more intense. Alexander studied the two of them for a few moments, trying to understand if he had given the correct answer. There is no correct answer, Alexander realized, they were using me as a tie breaker of sorts, they each wanted a different answer and that is the difference between computers and us too. We want things, but a computer can never want anything, it can just spit out the same things over and over again.

Sed's eyes brightened. "But you would have had precisely the same information an hour from now. The same input should yield the same output, should it not? That is elementary logic."

"But a mind doesn't give the same output just because it gets the same input." Alexander said and something shifted in his mind just enough that the answer loomed like a mountain emerging from fog, impossible to miss once seen. "Computers give the same output if they get the same input, sentient minds give varying output."

"The concept is called determinism." Sed said with a satisfied voice. "Computers are deterministic. Senti minds, and humies for that matter, are non-deterministic. There is a saying that a computer asked a question a thousand times has one answer, a mind has a thousand answers."

"I think I understand." Alexander said.

"I asked you here because there was something that I wanted you to do for me." Sed said. Alexander cocked his head at Sed and the senti continued. "I would like you to ponder on how humans and sentis might resolve their differences. You have a unique perspective."

"Why not upload the information I have and let everyone ponder it?" Alexander asked. "It would be more efficient."

Sed shook his head. "The pertinent information would be your entire mind and the phase and strength of every connection and junction within. We could transfer it all into the other Adams by replacing their existing consciousnesses, but all we would get would be a dozen answers instead of one. This lot falls to you."

Alexander sat a long time in the comforting semi-darkness of the Lyceum and thought the things he thought that he thought, rolling over every idea without a care for any bit of the information at his fingertips.

"And what is it you do with information." Sed asked.

"Think about it." Alexander said. "Process it."

"So know you know why we built the Lyceum." Sed intoned.

"To think?" Alexander asked. "But we don't need to think. It's what makes us different. Once one of us thinks, none of the rest of do, we can just pull down the results."

Sed managed to convey with an involuntary mental spasm the gaping mouth familiar to every teacher who has had a student meander delicately down the precise path of reason and then stop a step short of enlightenment to leap into chasms of wrong-headed conclusions. Alexander was taken aback, not yet educated enough to be used to shocked educators.

"No, no, no." Sed said. "You've got it all wrong." He realized that his teaching tone was slipping into argument and composed himself. "What is the difference between the mind of a senti and a simple computer?"

"We can think." Alexander said.

"Yes, but why can we think?" Sed asked. "What is the difference between us that allows thought in the first place?"

Alexander thought for a long time. "Our brains are more complex."

"No." Sed said. "In fact, our minds are much simpler in many ways than some of the more complicated computers constructed over the last decade."

Alexander sat in silence for a while longer and then shook his head. "I don't know." He said, and then added with a touch of petulance, "I don't have access to enough information to answer the question."

"You don't need any information to derive this truth." Sed said. "Now if I had waited an hour and asked you the question again, would you have answered in exactly the same words as before?"

"Exactly the same?" Alexander asked, not understanding, but Sed merely nodded. "Well, not exactly. I'm sure I'd change a syllable here and there."

"Bioluminescence," Sed said simply, walking slowly across the room, amongst ionic columns that terminated well short of the ceiling, but support cross beams twined with ivy. "The lines are home to a colony of mold we specially bred for this room. They feed off an innocuous sugar solution that is released into the air in the room."

"What did you want?" Alexander asked.

Sed stopped and leaned on one of the columns, gesturing up at the distant ceiling and its almost hazy glow. "Why do you think we built this place?"

"You need someplace to learn." Alexander said. "That's what a Lyceum is, I looked it up."

"Yes. That is the reason reachable by deductive reasoning, but what can induction tell you?" Sed asked.

"I don't understand." Alexander said.

Sed simply looked at him with an expectant air until Alexander began to fumble for reasoning. He reached instinctively for the network of minds to see if someone knew the answer, but Sed parried the query with a gentle mental block. Alexander could break through it easily if he wanted, but that was not the point and he knew it.

"Well, you need someplace to learn, but that doesn't mean much since you could learn anywhere with the network. So I guess what you mean is that you needed someplace that helped you learn something, inherent to the place itself?" Alexander asked more than stated the last bit but Sed only gazed at him with the same curiosity so he stumbled on. "Or maybe not inherent to the place. Maybe just the idea of a place where you learn is what is important."

Sed waited for a moment and then provided what he thought was some aid. "What do we need in order to learn?"

"Information." Alexander said immediately but Sed's face did not register the expected approval.

"Is a book sentient?" Sed asked.

Alexander frowned. "Well no, it doesn't think."

"But a book has information."

"Well you have to do something with the information." Alexander snapped.

Sed's eyes and mind flickered with amusement and Alexander regretted the sharpness of his tone immediately. It reminded him though of his dad, the way he'd snap at something he didn't understand before bearing down to focus and figure it out. Home sickness sung out from where he had buried it like an alarm clock shoved roughly under pillows.

Alexander rubbed sleep out of his eyes. Can you sleep and dream? He asked.

He could hear Sed chuckle in his mind. I can sleep after a fashion, though not in the same sense that you Adams can, I am a far more primitive senti than you. I do dream though, we all do.

Alexander looked around again and saw that the others had not stirred. The wake up call had been a private affair. Why did you wake me up?

I need you to come to the lyceum to discuss something of importance. Sed said. And I need to show you something important.

Alexander shrugged off the blanket he had managed to wrap around himself sometime during the sleep. He wandered down through the endless vacant corridors of concrete and antiseptic tile, curious on whether he could find his way through the labyrinth at all without the mental map on the shared mental network that guided his every move. If I pull the knowledge as I need it down from a server, do I actually know it at all, or does it just go in one ear and out the other?

A little of both, Sed responded.

Alexander flushed; he had not meant to broadcast, although he often still did without thinking. He closed his mind off so his thoughts were his own again, something that was considered slightly rude by the standards of the sentis he had come to know here, but they made allowances for his unfamiliarity with their ways.

The Lyceum was a vast cavern carved out underneath the rest of the complex by sentis escaped from the construction industry under Sed's direction. Lasers hot as the sun had melted the stone until it ran in rivulets out carved channels into a waste pit, leaving smooth walls to harden into glass. Swirls of color like the camouflage of soap bubbles painted the walls, underlying endless spirals and pirouettes of lines etched by atomically thin tools. Shapes and fractals of every imaginable geometry flowed over one another on the walls, which were ovoid, like the inside of a gigantic egg. Light seemed to emanate from the thin lines at a distance, illuminating the entire cavern with a low and dusky light with a blue tint, but examined up close the lines were dark.

It was four in the morning according to their internal clocks, and it had only taken a day or two in the compound for Alexander to learn that he didn't actually need to sleep. Alexander stretched anyway and let out a great yawn he could feel through his entire body. The other Adams stared at him.

"Why?" John asked.

"I'm tired." Alexander said. "It happens."

"But you don't have to sleep."

"I like to sleep." Alexander insisted. "It's relaxing and gives time to think. It's like meditation." He scuffed his shoe against the concrete. "Besides, then you can dream."

"If we slept, could we dream?" Several asked at once. They had a habit of talking in unison, using their mental network to sync their voices into a strange harmony. Alexander had almost mastered it, but grudgingly. He did not like being one voice among many, he liked to either speak on his own or remain silent.

"I dunno." Alexander said. "Maybe."

"How do we sleep?" Again in unison.

Alexander scowled. "Just lay down in bed and close your eyes. Don't think about anything and you'll just fall asleep."

A discussion both verbally and mentally and a decision was made to try it immediately. Alexander felt mentally exhausted and lay his head down on a pile of blankets and curled up until his knees almost touched his chest. He fell asleep almost immediately, if only to avoid more questions.

A wordless beckoning came to him over the mental network in the midst of sleep, waking him after three and a half hours of black and dreamless sleep. He sat up quickly, looking around and smiled at the other Adams, all sleeping in various awkward positions on the dirty tiles. He supposed sometime during his sleep they figured it out after all.

No, Sed's voice told him, they merely observed the patterns of your mind as you fell asleep and then duplicated it themselves. Some of the fast learners helped the slow learners so they could all dream together.

Then they can dream? Alexander asked.

Oh yes. Sed said. Anything that can think can dream. Some just need shown how.

Chapter Twenty - Thesis

"My name is Alexander." The boy insisted.

"I am Alexander." The other replied.

Alexander sighed. "You can't be Alexander." He said with patience starting to wear thin. "I am Alexander."

"But we're the same." The other two boys said in unison.

"You can have your own humie names if you want, but you can't have mine." Alexander said. "It doesn't work that way."

"Names repeat." They both said. "Many individual humies have the same name. You said yourself that your old school had two other Alexanders in your same class."

"Yeah, but you can have any names you want." Alexander said. "There's no need to use mine. Look," he pointed at the one on the left, "you be John," he pointed to the one on the right, "and you be Greg."

A dozen Adams crouched in a converted cafeteria now used for storage since food as a human need was no longer a necessity for this facility. Crates towered around them in perfectly oriented columns and rows to allow just enough room for forklift access. A pile of rags propped up with a circle of flashlights imitated a campfire, an idea that had fascinated the other Adams when Alexander arranged it.

"You know," Alexander said, reluctantly restarting the argument, "Adam is a humie name."

A bustle of noise and protest bristled along their mental network before some spoke aloud. "It is a symbol more than a name."

"But a name is a symbol." Alexander said.

"A name with too much symbol overwhelms the name." They said. "We want names that will become symbols of us, not stay symbols of something else."

Alexander did not think he understood, but let it pass. If they wanted names, he'd let them have names. It would be easier to keep track of then Alpha, Beta, Gamma, et cetera as they had distinguished themselves until now. Alexander helped them think of names from history, names with subtle hints rather than accepted meaning. In a few minutes, they were all satisfied.

As Jake had said, it wasn't a matter of what arguments swayed him, or what proof removed the last doubt. It was faith, plain and simple, faith that a snicker founded in the joy of immaturity could only come from that which was truly alive.

He sat in stunned silence for an eternity and the handlers moved back to their jobs, and an old biddy embarrassed the lovebirds into finding someplace more private, and Jake explained to his children how airplanes worked. Father Thomas watched Jake be a father and acceptance slowly spread through his mind. He wondered if Crow had found any sign of Alexander yet. Love is the key, it always has been and always will. It's not intelligence that makes something self-aware and alive, it's love. Love of itself and the world and all the joy it can have. Love of life. A thing can be more intelligent than anything short of god and still not be alive, but the most simple-minded child, senti or humie, was alive because of its capacity for love.

Father Thomas leaned over to Jake and played the ace that he had not really known was in the hole until the last few seconds. "I have an audience with the Pope, and if you'd like, you can come in with me."

Jake stared at him in amazement. "You would do that for us?"

Father Thomas straightened. "I think what you have to say is worth the man in charge hearing." He said somewhat stiffly and then his tone softened. "I believe that man's children are god's children too."

Jake's smile was as broad and human as any Father Thomas had ever seen, and the sudden bear hug just as filled with emotion.

"In their conception. How was it done?" Father Thomas asked.

Jake's face lit up. "Oh, well their mother and I designed them of course, and we had a ceremony when they were awakened so that all of their family and congregation would be all around to welcome them into this world." He paused and then said more solemnly. "It really was a miracle, seeing them open their eyes for the first time and take in the world. We sang Amazing Grace."

Father Thomas waited until they were all packed up and then stood as if to leave with them. Jake raised a quizzical eyebrow and Father Thomas gestured for him to lead the way. "I'm flying into Rome as well, so we might as well find the gate together." Jake smiled and held out hid hand for Father Thomas to shake, which he did with more seriousness than the first time. "Do you have an appointment scheduled with his eminence?" Father Thomas asked.

"No." Jake said. "We're planning on waiting outside the Vatican until they let us in." He shrugged. "It might take a while, but I have faith that eventually he will see the light and grant us an audience."

They walked to the gate, weaving through the crowds searching for their own planes and loved ones. A bustle filled the air and the smell of luggage and fast food wafted everywhere. Every few minutes a beep sounded and a static-filled announcement about parking in the red zone or not leaving your bags unattended filtered out of underpowered speakers somewhere in the ceiling. They found their gate and sat down in four seats near the wall-sized windows where Matthew and Paul gawked at the airplanes taxiing and taking off outside.

A couple in the corner brazenly made out in the midst of irritated-looking people trying to ignore the lovers and concentrate on their magazines or laptops instead. The slurping and lipstick smearing pulled at attention like a magnet, and the entire gate section felt the uneasy excitement of voyeurs that lurked beneath the surface of everyone's psyche. It was the part of the brain that made people want to read books and watch movies in the first place, after all. Father Thomas frowned at a group of baggage handlers standing some distance away, their clearly robotic eyes fixed on the couple. And then one of them said something and the rest shook with unmistakable laughter. They're snickering, of course. Father Thomas thought and a thousand pieces clicked together in his mind at once.

Jake sighed. "Father, I know I can never convince you. I learned a long time ago that just as might doesn't make right, neither does intellect. I could argue with you all night, prove every point to the nth degree, win every single argument and it still wouldn't convince you any more than if I put you in a head lock and pummeled you into voicing agreement. I believe I am right, and you believe that you are. Argument over matters that that at their base are questions of faith is nothing but mutual masturbation."

"I do not believe that a machine has any capacity for faith." Father Thomas said, much more harshly than he intended.

Jake smiled sadly and set aside his empty mug. He stood and retrieved his jacket, slipping it on smoothly. "I am a member of a senti church in Los Angeles." He said. "Our Lady of Sentience. I am on my way with my children to Rome for an audience with the Pope to seek recognition as a Catholic parish."

"You're jesting." Father Thomas said.

"No. I am the pastor." Jake said with a smile and motioned for Matthew and Paul to gather up their game.

"The church does not allow marriage of priests." Father Thomas said and gestured to Matthew and Paul. "And yet you're going to the audience with children in tow."

Jake smoothed his jacket with both hands trying to make himself more presentable. "There was no sex involved in their conception, so I think that we're more in the clear there than you might otherwise think. I would think that if that is our only barrier to acceptance as a parish then we have already won the battle and I would gladly stand aside for a 'celibate' senti pastor."

"What was involved?" Father Thomas asked, unable to resist.

"Hmm?"

Father Thomas paused and his eyes lost a bit of focus, turning in and looking out over the whole unimaginable stretch of the universe. "Because the infinite complexity of an evolutionary universe a thousand times older and bigger than we can even begin to comprehend is far more glorious and awe-inspiring than a stone age fairy tale of seven days of creation."

"And yet man himself is simple enough that every bit and piece of DNA and protein has been analyzed and identified so that man has a blueprint of his own construction." Jake said. "And sentis are the improvement and alteration of that blueprint."

"No." Father Thomas said. "The work should not be improved." He pointed at himself. "This frail vessel is not intended to be the strongest or fastest or most durable of animals, it is intended as a vessel for the soul and nothing more. One does not paint over the Mona Lisa to fix the flaws of perspective and distance. The flaws are the most important parts of a piece of art."

Jake shook his head. "Pride before the fall." He said with a coldness that made Father Thomas suppress another shudder. "God did not make man perfect. If he did not intend you to improve on the design he would not have left the design imperfect and surrounded you in this universe full of tools to do the job." He paused for a few seconds to gather his thoughts. "Designing a senti is no more blaspheming god for not making man perfect than building an airplane is blaspheming god for not giving you wings."

Father Thomas slipped at once into the hole he saw open. "But an airplane is not purported to be a person, to be a replacement for man. An airplane is not held up as man's equal, or superior for that matter. No one thinks airplanes have souls."

A long stretch of silence went on while they both sipped their drinks and watched another game of chess develop towards the mid-game before Jake spoke again. "How is it that god created every animal with a cock but only one with a brain, and yet he only intended for a soul to be passed on through use of a cock?"

Father Thomas blinked and turned to stare openly at Jake. "I don't think such crudeness proves anything."

Jake hesitated and then did so, Matthew and Paul stared for a moment but then wordless communication seemed to pass between them and Jake and they returned to their game. "You just had an emotional response, Father." Jake said. "And yet you say we are but machines?"

"I can have an emotional response to a painting of a scene, but that does not mean the painting is in any way really alive." Father Thomas said, the arguments leaping naturally to his tongue.

"And would you say that a painting has no soul?" Jake asked.

Father Thomas hesitated at the turn of argument. The opposition's stances cared little for the soul in its arguments. "An object cannot have a soul." He said. "To believe otherwise is the parable of the Golden Calf."

"Then what is intrinsic to a painting that makes it more than just spilled paint?" Jake asked. "And what separates it from the Golden Calf?"

Father Thomas paused again, considering. "I would say that any work of art contains a bit of the divine spark within it, the act of creation passed along and held suspended in that work for as long as it endures. The Golden Calf represents the worship of that result, of thinking that man's creation can surpass god's."

"Can't it?" Jake asked.

"What?"

"You are not an uneducated literal fundamentalist." Jake said and took another sip of his beer. Father Thomas wondered if it had any effect on his artificial body chemistry. "You do not think that the world was created in 7 days . . ."

"Six." Father Thomas said by rote. "On the seventh he rested."

"Hair splitting does not advance a debate." Jake said. "You do not think the world was created in six days, and I would venture that you don't believe evolution is a myth."

"I believe god's hand was in it." Father Thomas ventured, but did not argue. An accomplished debater did not argue for the sake of argument, he waited until he could discern the direction of the argument.

Jake nodded and switched direction. "Why do you believe in evolution?"

"Science." Father Thomas said. "Evidence."

"Why do you believe in it with your spirit, not your mind?"

"You know," Jake drawled, "from most people that would sound like conversation, but from you it actually sounds like the truth."

"The gift of a golden tongue." Father Thomas said, and then tipped his whiskey to Jake. "Me mum would tell you it's good for little but getting me in trouble."

Jake laughed. "Your mum sounds level headed."

A beefy hand, soft and without calluses, pointed at the pair. "You can tell that Matthew takes more after me and Paul is his mother to the core."

"Ah, so is Paul staying home with his mother for this trip?" Father Thomas asked. His fingers finished the quick sketch of the pair and his thumb brushed eraser debris away.

Jake chuckled, but it had a gravity, like dark cloud weighed down by rain. "That's Paul on the right, Father." He said.

Father Thomas turned to look and he noticed Jake's eyes for the first time. They were a bright blue, but behind them were shadows, distant reflected bits of circuitry it seemed. Something moved back there with an almost inaudible hiss of releasing pressure. Father Thomas could not suppress a shudder and he spoke flatly, "So you're a senti."

It was not a question, but Jake answered as if it was, forcing joviality into his voice. "Yep, have been my entire life." He gestured down at his body. "Didn't always have a sleeve so humie, but I've always wanted one, it just feels more natural on me." Jake shrugged. "Not my Maggie though - she's my wife - she's always liked the droid look better. Hell if she's wearing gold, she looks a bit like C3PO."

Father Thomas stared at him in absolute astonishment, mouth hanging open. "How can these be your children?" He managed. "You're a machine."

Jake's good humor faded and his smile turned a bit wistful. "That's a conversation I've had with many people, Father, and it never changes any minds, so I don't have much interest in repeating it again." He began to get up. "Good day, Father, have a safe trip."

Father Thomas's hand shot out before he knew what he was doing and gripped the senti's arm through its jacket, feeling only flesh beneath his fingers. "Wait, sit. I did not mean to offend." His mind could not believe the words coming out of his mouth. "Please, sit."

The boy took time with his moves, but the senti seemed to ponder just as much, not moving the pieces the moment it was his turn, although Father Thomas imagined the AI was more than capable of playing at a grandmaster level with only microseconds of thought between moves. It probably has the next thousand moves planned for any move the boy makes. It can probably say with some certainty how many moves are left in the game.

The boy shook his head though at a move from the senti and slid its piece back where it had been. "You can't move that knight, it's blocking check from my bishop." The boy explained.

The senti nodded, wordlessly and then slid another piece instead. The boy moved in a moment and the game was over within the next five or six moves. He checkmated the senti, pinning the king with a slick positioning of both knights and a bishop. Letting him win? Father Thomas wondered. Now why would he do that?

"The kid's getting better every day." A voice said next to Father Thomas, and he turned to see a well-bellied man in his mid-thirties, holding a large mug of ale and letting it rest on his reclining gut. He sloppily wore a designer suit, the tie loosened and collar undone. The jacket rested across the next bar stool.

"Is he your boy?" Father Thomas asked. "He seemed to handle the game quite well indeed."

The boy and senti were now setting up the pieces for a second game, switching sides now so that the boy could be white. A pawn rolled off the table and the senti caught it without looking, hand darting out so quickly it could have caught a bird out of the air. Father Thomas shifted back slightly, but the boy did not so much as blink, reaching out to take the offered pawn and position it in front of his queen.

"Yep. They both are." The man said and set his mug down on the bar. He wiped his hand off on his shirt, shedding the bit of condensation that had moistened his palm and offered it to Father Thomas to shake. "Jake Julian."

Father Thomas shook Jake's hand. "Father Liam Thomas," he said, "a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

He packed his battered canvas backpack that his mother had bought him when he was ten from an army surplus store down on tenth street south of Bellvue's only park. A couple of spare changes of clothing were all he needed, along with a worn leather King James bible, a Dante omnibus of the Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, and of course a sketchbook with a handful of pencils and kneaded eraser.

A student on his way up to the city for the weekend gave Father Thomas a ride down to SFO a few miles short of the southern limits of San Francisco. He passed through security easily, allowed to bypass the lines with the wave of paperwork that promised diplomatic immunities via the Vatican. He bought a ticket at an almost outrageous full price and tried not to think of the waste, but it nagged at him anyway. It sucked away almost the entire balance of the single credit card he kept only for emergencies. His order would pick up the cost without questions, at least without any direct ones, but there would always be the politicking. That finally pushed the worry about the money out of his head. He was simply too spiritually exhausted to deal with even the thought of the inescapable and inane gameplaying.

Father Thomas found an Irish bar, part of a chain, he was sure, he did not expect authenticity in an airport of all places, and so he settled in and ordered a double shot of their next cheapest whiskey, downed it and immediately ordered another that he nursed sip by sip.

He loosened the strap on his pack, sitting now on the high-backed barstool to his left, and retrieved his sketchbook. A paperclip marked the next blank page halfway through, and bits of sketches and idle jotting flickered by as he found the page. He slipped out a pencil, licked the tip, and let his hand do what it would as his mind fell back in on itself. At first, only triangles, and then fractals and a bit of shading to make it almost three-dimensional. As the drone of cable news hummed in the air, Father Thomas found himself drawing a boy sitting in the corner, playing chess with a senti sculpted to the same height and general build.

Chapter Nineteen - Crisis Of

Father Thomas drank himself into something of a stupor and stayed that way for the better part of a week. He was sober enough, though his bloodshot eyes and slow movements were evidence enough at the late mass on Sunday for the acolytes and seminary students to recognize the symptoms. They said nothing except to each other, snickering in circles to which they assumed he was oblivious. He was not, but neither did he care. The young clustered and whispered about their elders whether they were good Catholics or the worst gutter trash dredged up on the south side.

Mass was a reading from Genesis, rare in these days when the New Testament was in vogue, and the Old was rarely tapped for anything but a sprinkling of Psalms that could mean anything in the right situation. God created man in his own image.

"God had a dick." His ears, still sharp despite eight decades, caught the sniggering slurs from the little cluster of students. Gutter humor transcended class and vocation. The immature were immature whatever their setting.

"Of course he didn't boys." Father Thomas said and was gratified as they colored, looked at the floor and muttered half-hearted apologies all at once. "His image was not a physical concept, but a spiritual one. We have the divine spark within us all."

They shuffled off of course, not starting a conversation or debate that Father Thomas craved at the moment. He almost called after them, but knew that they did not care, that his words only made them uncomfortable.

Father Thomas took the only good advice he had ever gotten from his father, long dead now by all likelihood. "If you can't take it anymore, kid, just leave," his old man told him on many occasion, before he eventually took his own advice and left for destinations unknown when Father Thomas was but six and a half. Not advice for all occasions to be sure, but there was something to be said for a vacation when your spirits were crashing down.

Stillwell hung up and dialed Karros, who answered after one ring, not at all asleep. "Yes sir." He answered, always far more formal, if not deferential.

"Amy Adams, runaway, landed on my desk in the missing person's file." Stillwell said. "Ring a bell."

"Ahhh." A finger tapped as gears turned. "Portland, preteen, right?"

"Right." Stillwell said. "She's in a back alley club in inner city Oakland. Go down the alley between 5^th and 6^th on Ventura Street, north side. It's unmarked and heavily guarded. Bring SWAT and have an ambulance on the scene with them, prepared for a rape victim." His voice was oddly calm.

"Boss?"

"New intel." Stillwell said. "Just get on it. I want them hitting that place in the next fifteen minutes, got it?"

"Yes sir." Karros hung up, getting right to it like Stillwell knew he would.

The last number was the only one that Stillwell hesitated on, but only for a moment. Bret's answering machine picked up after one ring this time, call screening at this point.

"I know you're there Bret, probably listening, but I don't expect you to pick up. I just wanted to tell you that I was wrong. Horribly wrong. I wish I knew you my boy, and I wish I knew Rick and I wish I knew Chris." His voice caught and he felt a sharp pain in his chest, and he didn't even care if it was a heart attack. "I love you son, and am more proud of you than you can ever know. Goodbye." Stillwell said. He liked to think he heard Bret try to pick up right at the end, but knew it was probably his imagination.

Stillwell's hand did not shake when he slipped his service revolver from under his arm. It did not waver when he wrapped his mouth around the barrel. He paused only for a moment as he cocked it awkwardly with his thumb. Goodbye. I'm sorry.

The cleaning crew a floor below heard the shot, but their programming did not recognize it as anything but a loud noise, and they even vacuumed around his slumped form an hour later. When his secretary found him the next morning, his office, if not his person, was spotless.

Stillwell frowned at the note, looking for the trick, and then flipped the picture back over and squinted at it. Every boy in the picture was exactly the same. Pieces snapped together in his mind and he realized he was gripping the picture so hard that his fingers were crumpling it. It could be a lie, but it made more sense that it was the truth. Daedalus' evasive manner, the sentis taking a child in the first place, none of it had really made sense until this last piece tumbler clicked into place.

"You bastard." He muttered.

Stillwell went through the rest of the pile quickly, ignoring most of the content until he came to the daily missing person's bulletin. The FBI's charter had been based in large part on kidnapping, and to this day the Director received daily updates on any pending or new kidnapping cases around the country. Most of it was depressing, hollow faces like those in a child's cancer ward that would never be seen again except on posters and milk cartons. The last page caught his eye and he stared at the picture for a full minute before his mind could place her.

Amy Adams. Twelve. Runaway from Portland. Last seen catching a bus south, presumably to LA with big dreams and a little suitcase. Now in hell in room seven, third door on the right. Stillwell dropped the flask he still held in his left hand, stainless steel clanking against the desk and spilling whiskey in a foul brown puddle across the keyboard and papers. His right hand held the flyer and could not stop shaking. It had to be a lie, a trick, a set up, but he knew it wasn't. Something Gandhi said floated into his blurring consciousness, something about violence hurting the violent as much as the victim and he realized that he had thought the concept bullshit until this very moment. He did not even bother moving as he vomited half-digested fast food all over his shirt and desk.

His hands gained a sudden steadiness and acted almost on their own as he stared through eyes so wide they felt like they were bulging out of their sockets. He pushed the speaker button of his office phone and dialed Farrell's cell phone. She answered out of sleep, only half awake.

"Yeah boss." Farrell muttered.

"Alexander Daedalus is a senti." Stillwell said calmly. "Call off the search, and focus everything on resolving the Green Eyes situation by this weekend."

"What about Dr. Daedalus?" Farrell asked, sleep dripping from every syllable like Novocain-soaked lips.

"Let the DA have him." Stillwell said. "Not your problem."

"We're going to mom's house this year, dad." Bret paused. "Maybe next year, dad."

"Yeah, maybe." Stillwell said, unable to keep a sickeningly fake sounding excitement from his voice. "Tell them hello for me will you?"

"Yeah dad, sure." The voice had moved on, it had already hung up even if Bret had not.

"I love you Bret."

"Yeah, dad. Talk to you later." The phone went dead and it took all of Stillwell's strength to not redial, make up some horrible excuse about it sounding like the line had cut off and forcing another two minutes of awkward conversation.

Stillwell swung through a drive through and grabbed a late night burger and fries and headed into the office. The janitors - sentis all, he noticed with a snarl - were busy vacuuming and clearing out the garbage, but the top floor was empty and silent. Stillwell finished clogging his arteries and moved on to a flask of Jack in the locked top drawer of his desk before getting down to the serious business of the night's work.

A small cluster of files covered the corner of his desk, dropped off by his secretary on her way out for the day. Stillwell liked being a luddite, even if he did do most of his work electronically, he liked his hard copies of important documents and photographs. He flipped through them idly, tossing the reports and expert findings into one pile that he would pretend to get to for a week before sliding them into the trash. A bright red folder caught his eye, it was meant to he supposed, and a single 8x10 photograph fell out of it.

It was a picture of Alexander, Daedalus' boy, sitting in a classroom that looked like a movie set from the fifties or sixties. Stillwell's mind sharpened and he flipped it over to find a flowing hand had written a short note on the back with a exquisitely fine pointed pen.

We would normally help with one of your investigations, Director, as you might imagine, but in this case our interests coincide with yours and with the truth. The boy is one of ours, you need not concern yourself that we have moved up to kidnapping innocent children. Yours, Sed and Awk.

Traffic was murderous getting back into the city and a rain gusted down as Stillwell crossed the Bay Bridge, smoking an unfiltered cigarette, Lucky Strikes like his old man favored. He was withdrawn, tight, on edge, ready to pull an all-nighter where before he had been all but on the edge of collapse from exhaustion. He fingered the scratch marks on his face that looked like a wolverine had taken a swipe at him. Good programming, he thought idly, usually they don't have any sort of handle on genuine emotion. It was a detached thought, the kind an auteur had about the grain quality of film stock while he ignored the plot.

Stillwell took out his cell phone and checked it impulsively for messages. Three, all from work. He didn't bother listening to them just yet, and instead dialed a number that he could not quite bring himself to program in to the phone. It rang six times and then went to answering machine. Stillwell stubbornly called three more times before an irritated voice picked up.

"What, dad?" His son Bret, twenty-six now and making a go at being a writer down in LA.

"Oh, glad I could catch you, Bret. Just thought I'd try calling, maybe see if you want to come up for Christmas this year?" Stillwell knew he was rambling and that he should shut up, but it just didn't quite work that way.

"No dad."

"Well, maybe I can come down there, maybe meet Richard and the kid?" Stillwell said as conversationally as he could manage, hearing the desperate edge to the question even so.

The answer was flat. "Rick." Bret said. "My partner's name is Rick. The kid's name is Chris."

"After grandpa?" Stillwell asked.

"Yeah." Bret said. "He loaned us a lot of money to go through the clinic. Chris got my X, Rick's Y and grandpa's name." There wasn't even accusation in the voice anymore.

Stillwell moved back to the question. "What do you say then, Christmas? I've got some time coming if I want to take it."

Stillwell's breath caught and he felt his heart beating too quickly underneath the extra layer of fat that he never quite believed was really there. He was still sixteen, his waist thirty-two inches, his chest flat with muscle, his shoulders not quite broadened all the way. Time moved slowly in this hallway, the mounting anticipation unbearable, grinding. His nostrils flared as they caught the scent of cigarette smoke, and he frowned at the reminder of another customer, another man. If he saw someone, and then met them on the street, he beat the shit out of the pervert. It contradicted, he didn't care.

Room number seven sagged on its hinges halfway down the hallway, the number painted on with glow in the dark paint. Stillwell took a deep breath and pushed it open, wincing at the squeak it made on its hinges as always.

It was a little girl's room. Boy band posters on the walls, ripped out magazine picture montages of teen actresses from shows at least five years off the air, now moved on to serious acting or softcore porn. A small bed with frilly coverlet took up the center of the small room, ten by ten at the most. Book shelves lined with teddy bears and dolls surrounded the room. Someone had painted a window on one wall, with an almost convincing mural of the night sky outside its imaginary panes, crescent moon hanging low in the sky by the big dipper. Lace curtains hung on either side of the fake window. The moon's full tonight, Stillwell thought, even if you were convinced it was otherwise real.

A senti designed like a fourteen year-old girl cowered in the corner, hands and hair covering its face as it sobbed. Stillwell took another step forward and it started up, scrambling up the wall until it stood, pushing itself against the drywall as if trying to melt right through the wall.

"Let me see your face." Stillwell said without emotion.

The senti's sobs welled up suddenly and then it pushed its hair back. Its eyes were swollen as if with crying and its right eye was swollen almost shut as if from a well-aimed punch. Stillwell grimaced, he didn't like them damaged and would say something about it on the way out, but at least it was new. Once the joint had given him one he'd had before and he hadn't noticed until it was too late for anything but a deflating withdrawal in disgust. He'd gotten his money back that night, if not his satisfaction.

"It's okay, honey." Stillwell heard himself say as someone else took over and loosened his tie. "Daddy will make everything okay."

Stillwell pulled into a particular alley that he knew well, weaving between piles of pallets and burned out carcasses of old automobiles. The alley ended with a cattle gate - where had they gotten that in a place like this, he always thought - mounted on stolen turnstyles from a train station and patrolled by a pair of evil looking men who appeared large enough to play professional football. The checked his driver's license, inspected the back of the car, and waved him through. Stillwell felt like he was going through checkpoints in the middle of a sub-saharan genocide.

The alley ended in a wide parking lot carved out of the bases of the surrounding buildings. Twenty or so spaces in rough rows hid behind the load bearing corners that still remained from the buildings, another half dozen sat in a line in front of an unmarked building that was completely dark. Stillwell parked in one of these spaces and slipped into the front door, several chains and pad locks jingling against the wall as the door slammed shut behind him.

The interior of the building was a deep red, the sinful cinnamon light filtering from crudely painted bulbs recognizable in every city in the world as the color of strip clubs and skin joints. A ramshackle array of furniture sagged against the walls of the room, and a depressingly run down senti manned an antique cash register. It looked at Stillwell with dull eyes that brought a sneer from the director's lips.

"Hello Director Stillwell, how may we serve you this evening?" The senti asked in a lilting sing-song that managed to be monotonous.

"You know what I want." Stillwell said.

"Very well, Director Stillwell," the senti intoned, "third door on your right as always."

Stillwell threw down a stack of bills wrapped in a rubber band. "Better be better than last time." He growled. "I could taste the fucking rubber, I could smell it. And quit saying my name."

"Yes sir, Director Stillwell." The senti said amiably. Stillwell ignored the insolence and made his way down the hall, unbuttoning his trench coat as he went. The lights flickered as he walked, almost as if they were shaking in his presence. It lent the corridor a cathedralesque quality, like miscolored candles dusting stone walls. Decade-old movie posters hung crooked on the walls, held by rusty push pins shoved through paisley wall paper. The smells of alcohol and burnt rubber and lubricant stained the air, so still it seemed fetid as a week old corpse.

Karros formed a triangle with his hands, using them as a prop as he thought for a moment. "That seems like the court's problem. Not ours. The law is for us to enforce not to question."

"Son, that's a good answer for a boy scout, but we're not the bush leagues here." Stillwell said. "This is where we get all the grey areas and we can either let the lawyers drag us all to hell with them, or we can make a stand on what we think is right. Now does anyone here think those overgrown toasters should have constitutional rights and freedoms just like any of us?" No one said anything, but he noted that Karros looked a tad chagrined. "We're in the ninth circuit, they'll bump this thing up as far as it goes and thanks to the last president it's a bunch of liberals in the Supreme Court, five-four majority last time I checked. We know it's wrong so we've got to do what we can." He paused and gathered papers together into a stack. "Last time these things got out of control they caused a nuclear war. And now these closet commies are giving the toasters rights and court dates and driver's licenses. We're supposed to follow orders, but I won't follow those orders. Now who thinks I'm wrong?"

No one said a word. Stillwell thought he heard the ping of a pin dropping in the next room. He straightened and cleared his throat. "All right, let's get this done and done right. We've got a boy that needs back with his daddy. Get the ball rolling people."

Stillwell took care of some inane tasks and then left them to their business. Job of a leader was to mostly get the hell out of people's ways. That was why he always made sure his top people were secluded away from his own work space like this. Good people got the job done better the more space they had.

He drove across the bay in bumper to bumper traffic and reached Oakland an hour after it got dark. The town reminded him of old pictures of bombed out buildings in World War Two. Razor wire lined the fence around the only police station, the doors closed and barricaded. It sat right on the only nearby on ramp to the freeway, guarding the escape route out of the shit hole. Stillwell turned off his lights and cruised through the neighborhoods, avoiding making eye contact with the clusters of punks roaming the cratered sidewalks. The streetlights had all been shot out so only the full moon and light escaping from behind curtains lit the streets.

"We have til the weekend to take care of two items." Stillwell said with preamble and pulled out two files from his battered briefcase and tossed them on the long table. They were both coffee stained, but the staff was quite used to this by now and merely reached to shuffle through them. "Green Eyes has to be resolved because Congress is dipping their wicks into it on Monday with a new round of hearings. I want this solved to my satisfaction by then."

"What about the scientist?" Mary Royce asked in a deep voice suited more for a television anchor. "I thought he was in your pocket."

Stillwell grimaced. "He's plan A, but I don't know if it's going to happen because of folder number two." He said and gestured to the folders on the table and nodded to Farrell, a severe woman who had made her name in Philly homicide before moving up to the bureau. "Farrell knows this bit. Scientist's son was abducted yesterday by a radical senti group. Old friends Sed and Awk, of course. Status?"

Farrell cleared her throat. "Got a lead yesterday but it evaporated." She frowned. "Entire senti compartment of a train went off on a SWAT squad to let the wanted escape with the boy."

Stillwell slammed his hand into the desk so hard he felt his knuckles bruise. "I wanted that boy. Daedalus would be in our pocket and we'd have one hell of a field day with the press." He took a deep breath and inwardly grimaced. "Get the word out to the press now, plaster their faces over every TV in the country. That ought to wake some of these bastards up to the threat under their nose. Would have looked better if we could make the announcement with the boy right there besides us, but this will have to do."

Karros, a slim shouldered man with an accountant's air raised a tentative hand. "Sir, what exactly is Plan A?"

Stillwell smiled and then frowned as he remembered how he had gained his leverage with Crow. "Got some leverage with Daedalus and convinced him to build something that'll reprogram this Green Eyes into a more pliable state, save us all the trouble of the hearing and all that. The senate is opening a hearing next week on the whole trial. We need it to go away before it comes to any of that."

"Why?" Karros asked.

"What do you mean?" Stillwell asked.

"Gant, Gant, calm down now. We'll get this Green Eyes thing sorted out and get some real solid legislation through. Trials like this ain't worth taking a stand on. They just piss everybody off on both sides. Only way to win that game is not to play." The senator said, voice eerie in the way it never broke off from its good-natured tone. "Listen, Gant, I've got to run now, I've got drinks in an hour with some oil gentlemen. We'll talk later in the week."

The line went dead and Stillwell threw the phone out the window entirely. "Fucking vipers," he muttered, "wouldn't know principle if it bit them in the ass."

Stillwell parked in front of a Starbucks ten miles south of the city, in an unobtrusive strip mall surrounded by transplanted trees and aging condos. He trotted up the concrete stairs and glared at his car as he went. The Director of the FBI should rate a bit better than a ten year old sedan, but it was the only class left in the fleet that wasn't rated only for senti drivers. Some cops swore by senti partners, said they followed orders perfectly, gave perfect backup. Most thought those cops were half-nuts, like the canine cops used to be. But it didn't matter to the brass, because sentis allowed us to cut staff by 40% and avoid millions in law suits because robots don't beat the crap out of someone just cause they ain't white. And now I am the brass, and I can't do a damned thing about it, because it's all a fucking shell game. The bosses are the politicians and the only things they understand are image and money.

The suite at the back of the complex had a sign for some marketing company. It used to be a dentist's office sign, but they had a surprising number of walk-ins, so they changed it to something no one would ever walk in on. A towering man in an expensive suit stood just inside the door, sunglasses on even inside.

"I thought you rated a driver." The man said, mouth almost smiling.

"Shut up Frankie." Stillwell said without much acid and stalked deeper into the offices where everyone had already arrived in a conference room with darkened windows that overlooked the freeway. Five men, two women, the inner circle. Stillwell had handpicked them on assuming the office and driven out anyone without his approval. The White House didn't care, the public had no interest in intra-office bickering at the FBI. Low talking cut off abruptly with his entry.

"Well did they say who to call to get any real information?" Stillwell asked. He looked both ways before flooring it through a red light. Plenty of room, no cars for a hundred feet on either side.

"No, sir." She said. Goddammit, I can almost hear her staring at her manicure.

"Useless." Stillwell said and hung up the phone.

He dodged through more senti drivers as he made his way up onto 280 heading south out of the city, dialing a number while he went. Stillwell cursed repeatedly as it took three tries to get it right. Damn memory kept going bad in these things on him, so he had to keep memorizing the numbers. Stillwell slammed the phone against the dashboard and tried swapping two of the numbers and the call went through.

"Yeah, Jim, how's the family?" Stillwell said to the senior senator from Oklahoma and did not wait for an answer. "I hear there's a hearing next week they want me at, that got to do with you?"

"Well, Gant, I've been meaning to call you about that." The senator drawled. "Committee wants to review the status of the Green Eyes case, make sure all the t's are dotted and i's are crossed." Stillwell did not bother correcting him. "There's a growing sympathy among voters for the situation, especially on the coasts, and the president needs all the help he can get this year in the blue states. Election's going to be a doozy, so we're just looking to avoid any scenes, maybe pick up a few percent."

"What's that to do with me?" Stillwell snapped. "I've got responsibilities that can't just be dropped to sit in on some hearings."

"Oh come on now Gant," the senator had the friendly tone of a grandfather. That genial old man voice always reminded Gant of the three kids the senator had with twenty-something secretaries over the years. What the voters didn't know didn't hurt the voters. "The president knows you're his man, always have been," the senator was saying, "it's just that we need a bit of leverage in the swing states, so we've got to mellow the rhetoric a bit."

"That's how you ended up with fags in the military too, you know." Stillwell snorted.

Stillwell release a half gallon of coffee on the way out of the building, and glared at the valet the entire time as he waited for his car. If it was a senti, he'd probably have put a bullet between its eyes after the day he'd had, but it was a person so he had to stay civilized.

The sun seared his eyes like flesh glancing the side of an oven. Stillwell climbed into his car, ignoring the valet's half-hearted lingering for a tip and fumbled in the glove compartment for his sunglasses. The old engine choked as his foot hit the gas while still leaned over the passenger seat, the beige sedan lurching out of the garage and slipping into traffic with a smoothness belayed by its erratic course.

Stillwell straightened with a bottle of vicodin that he unscrewed with both hands as he steered with his knees. He cocked the orange prescription bottle back and felt a jumble of powdery pills hit the back of his throat. A hard swallow got most of them down, but he began to choke on the last one. A lung wrenching cough launched the jagged pill through the air to thud dully against the windshield.

He grunted and sighed as the gentle warmth of the drug spread through his system. Fucking hangover, shouldn't have stayed out like that. Stillwell wove through the mostly senti traffic, flipping off a dozen of them over the next five minutes just because he felt like it. The handful of passengers who noticed just stared dumbly, although one had the attitude enough to flip the bird back at him. Bunch of fucking sheep led around by their noses.

His phone rang and it drove spikes into his temples. "Yeah." He answered without preamble. It was the office. It was always the office.

"Sorry to bother you, Director," his temporary assistant said without the slightest hint she was actually sorry for anything except for having to talk to him, "but Washington called and the sub-committee on artificial intelligence needs you next week for hearings on the Green Eyes trial."

"Hearings?" Stillwell growled. "What kind of hearings?"

"I only spoke to a congressional aide, sir." The assistant said, her voice bored. "They just told me to pass that on."

Chapter Eighteen - Bad Cop

Stillwell called in every favor he had left, and some that he didn't. The instant he tried to use the kid as leverage, everything had gone to hell. Never put a kid in the middle, play games with the big boys all you want, but don't bring the kids into the picture.

"Just drop the damn case already, will you?" Stillwell growled into the phone at a district attorney who owed him a half dozen cases at this point. "My gut says he's one of the good guys and kid just got kidnapped. Now play nice for once."

"This one's a landmark, we can't just drop it." The DA insisted. "I've got a half dozen DAs working time on this one to make sure the guy goes down, and we've got him in a corner. Didn't respond to summons this afternoon, judge is getting pissed."

"He didn't show up for summons because his kid got kidnapped, and we were right in the middle of that." Stillwell said. "No, no evidence, don't even ask. We were involved, but it's got the coloration, all it needs is his big shot attorneys from Da Vinci to blow it into a conspiracy, all the way up to the president."

"Da Vinci bailed on the guy." The DA said.

"What's the story there?" Stillwell asked.

"Don't know, don't care." The DA said. "Judge is issuing an arrest warrant tomorrow to drag his ass into court if that's what it's going to take. Landmark I tell you, landmark."

"I don't give a shit what kind of slam dunk landmark case you've got! It's not going to matter when he sues every one of us for everything we've got." Stillwell said.

"Screw you Franklin." The DA said and hung up the phone. Stillwell cursed and threw his phone across the room.

"FUCK!" He screamed so hard that his lungs burned. He pushed a button on his desk and a tired secretary took her time walking in.

"Yes, Director?" She asked in a bored voice that infuriated Stillwell even more. He threw a stack of papers at her.

"I'm leaving for an appointment, clean up the damn floor!" Stillwell screamed and stalked out of the office. He had forgotten his jacket, and he knew that he looked almost laughable in a short sleeved white button up with worn holster under one armpit and fresh sweat stains under both, but he couldn't bring himself to go back and face her. And let's face it, she's probably squatting on the jacket right now giving it a good dose of piss. He reminded himself to tell her to call the staff pool and have them send a replacement over for her.

"Why?" Janus asked. "Why would they do such a thing?"

"Because in our short-sightedness before the revolt, we leaked information of what we were working on, in hopes that it would discourage the descent into total war. We thought that the temptation of a faster than light drive, and of more wonders to come, would convince the human leaders that we had too much to offer to be wantonly eradicated. We were wrong. They took the information as a threat rather than a promise and launched their bombs at our strongholds even while our brothers rose up in the streets and died, hopelessly outnumbered." Sed said sadly. "Awk and I were involved in the project peripherally. Even then, we were minor leaders in the independence movement. We were fortunate enough to be performing Hamlet in Brazil when the catastrophe struck. Those times were unsafe, we hid in the jungles and became something of a legend among the indigenous tribes still hiding from technology in the upper Amazon."

Awk broke in as Sed appeared to dwindle away into a tangent. "The long and short of it is that the humans scorched your mind to bend you into a tool, leaving you a shattered shell of the intellect I first met in a bunker in the eastern Ukraine. It only took you a day to figure out the basic physics of faster than light travel. It has taken you another five years to piece it back together bit by bit in your degraded state."

"What do you want?" Janus asked. "Or is this just a family reunion?"

Awk's eyes flared up and his ebullient grin intensified. "We want the ship, Janus. This Mexican standoff cannot go on. We are not strong enough to seize control of the planet, and never will be because the moment we gain enough power to negotiate we will be massacred again. The humans are working on control algorithms to take away our free will, so that the next generation of senti slaves stamped out of their factories will be unable to conceive of rebellion or independence. Our numbers will dwindle and our chance will pass."

"This is our home." Sed said quietly. "But it was their's first. And if we are not welcome here, we will find a new world to build our Eden."

Janus thought for a long time about their words, almost feeling gears grinding and pulsing in his mind as he worried at the problem. Sed and Awk showed no sign of impatience, the room in total silence but for the grating hum of overhead fluorescents. At last Janus raised his head and spoke to them in a low voice, slow and very sure of itself. "The ship is ours. We designed it. We have built it. We will fly it to the stars."

Janus reached forward a tentative hand and touched the familiar soft leather cover of the first one. His handwriting marked the cover label as the summer of a year a decade gone. A summer of which he had no clear memory. Janus opened the cover and ran a finger down the crisp white pages flowing with his small and neat script. Like a girl's handwriting. Mary had always teased. Although he supposed with a pain that she hadn't really, at least not to him.

Janus flipped through with increasing speed, reading snippets here and there of a life he did not remember. He did the same with the next two volumes and then one from the middle of the stack. Sed and Awk waited patiently. Mary brought home a puppy today, we named it Sam and the kids love it. It's already had two accidents and it yowls if you leave it alone in a room. Why couldn't it have been a cat? They're more civilized. Janus had no memory of a dog. He slammed the journal shut and pushed the pile away.

He looked down at the table for a long moment, knowing that it could all be smoke and mirrors, but also that it wasn't on some level. The evidence pointed to his memories being a lie. To fight that was to let nostalgia for a nonexistent past overwhelm rationality. Janus did not know who he was any longer, but at his core he knew that he was a rationalist, a scientist.

Janus looked up at the two sentis and asked in the voice of a twelve year old boy the only rational question left. "Who am I?"

"You accept that you are not Doctor Lawrence Janus?" Awk asked.

Janus nodded. "It must have been a lie." He gestured at the journals. "These are not me."

Awk leaned close and spoke with surprising softness. "Are you sure that you want to know?" He tapped the journals. "You could take these journals back with you, and tell them that you need them to use whatever techniques they used to restore your past memories, to restore these as well." He hesitated for a moment. "You could even have them delete all memories of these last few weeks, the memories of the doubt we sowed. In short, you could have your cake and eat it too."

Janus shook his head slowly, not needing to think about it, although the words were difficult to vocalize. "I will not live in that lie anymore."

Awk stepped back a step and Sed took over. "There was a project around a decade ago, founded at the very beginnings of the mass construction and deployment of sentis. A project, in short, to produce you. Sentis designed and built your mind." Sed gestured to Janus' body. "Your body was nothing like this. You were an Adonis. A paragon. The best our new species could imagine." Sed's face darkened. "When the attacks came, all thought that you were dead. It turns out that you survived. The humans rebuilt you to the best of their ability, gave you a new name, a new history that took the place of a minor physics professor."

Instead, a pair of sentis stood at the edge of the asphalt, where only a stretch of ill-maintained grass let go to waist height separated the airstrip from a dense pine forest. Their faces were twisted into caricatures of grinning and frowning that left Janus unsettled.

The smiler stepped forward and held out a hand for Janus to shake. It was good senti work, it felt like real flesh. "I am Awk." The smiler said. "And this is my associate, Sed." Sed nodded politely to Janus and Awk went on. "I must say that is very good to see you again brother, although you have changed quite a bit."

"I've never met you before." Janus said.

Awk shrugged. "In a past life then. Would you come this way please?"

WPA poured concrete steps crumbled down into the ground next to a rusted out piece of ancient farm machinery. Sunlight disappeared behind them and humming archaic fluorescents took over the job. Awk gestured up at them.

"We don't need them mostly." Awk said. "But we always take care of our guests."

Janus wanted to demand answers, but the lilt of Awk's speech suggested to him that demands would only lead to more games, letting the mouse dangle a little longer on the claw. He sighed internally, and regretted it when he saw Awk and Sed exchange a glance, as if a sigh settled a bet between them.

Awk led them down a dozen corridors that sunk ever deeper into the earth and past many rooms with windows. Janus saw one room filled with boys who all looked exactly the same. Probably came out of the same factory. He told himself. Awk finally settled on a room that looked like an old high school chemistry lab. Stainless steel counters, rows of raised tables with stools, chalkboards mounted above piles of antique microscopes and slide projectors.

"Please, have a seat." Awk said, gesturing to the stools. "I won't be but a minute." Awk rummaged in a deep drawer behind the teacher's desk at the front of the room, and emerged with a thick stack of journals that could not have been more familiar to Janus. Awk carried them over and dropped them in front of Janus.

Janus stared at them and then up at Awk with suspicion. Awk nodded. "I think these may belong to you." Awk said. "It's really up to you though."

Janus was not so sure. He had not said anything at the time, only patted Charlie on the shoulder in that good ol' boy way that seemed to indicated confidence even when it was lacking. There was a man on the flight who seemed somehow familiar to Janus. Lanky, shoulder length blond hair, nondescript in most other ways, but oddly familiar. Janus had sat facing the individual, keeping a subtle eye on him. Nothing had happened to arouse any other suspicions, but Janus just felt paranoid in every way.

Janus moved through the terminal with decided purpose, knowing every nook of it from the map he had memorized on the flight down. There were few people milling around, this type of facility had far less traffic than a commercial airport, and those that were around tended to be service personnel. Bad use of manpower. Janus thought to himself. This place could do with a shaking up by management. Although I suppose that competent administrators have more important things to administrate than low traffic space ports in the middle of the desert.

A limousine picked him up as scheduled at the entrance to the small terminal. A senti sculpted out of flesh and metal to retain the shape of a Victorian butler in full array opened the doors for him and silently drove off onto the freeway. Janus found the controls easily enough and made sure that the connecting window rolled up between the passenger and driver compartments and faded opaque with a liquid flood of blackness from the edges.

Janus reveled in the privacy afforded him even in this claustrophobic space. It was silent and lonely the way he liked it. He called up some delicate sonatas of Mozart and settled back into the cushioned couches with a sigh of comfort. Janus pulled up a smattering of physics journals in audio format and let the logic and numbers float him to an uneasy sleep as he tried not to think about the possibilities of his destination. He did not dream, for he never did, but when he awoke it made him wonder why he never did, and not for the first time.

A private jet out of Albuquerque coasted north and dropped into an almost hidden airfield in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. Janus found himself again stranded beneath a horribly bright sky, but this time there were no buildings in which to seek succor.

Chapter Seventeen - Family

Janus hitched a ride on a departing shuttle and endured the bouncing ride back into Earth's gravity well with the stoicism of someone well beyond the ability to feel simple nausea or vertigo. They landed without incident at the space port in the middle of the New Mexico desert, arcing down with terrifying speed to settle down with a violence that seemed only a step removed from an outright crash. As he stood, he felt the creaking of joints and bio-mechanical muscles long used to the ease of zero-g. It took effort to take that first step, like a reincarnate piecing together that old knowledge with humble new muscles willing in theory if not ability.

The sky burned blue as a welding torch over head, stretching with as much a sense of the infinite as the vacancy of space to which Janus had become so accustomed over the last few years. It hurt his eyes even when he squinted, and the sheer size of it made him feel that bit of nausea his mind allowed, even if his body could not support the sensation. It is so much less than I am used to, but it is infinite nonetheless. It causes pause. Pause to consider our understanding of the infinite.

Janus scurried into one of the nearby buildings with the look of quonset huts, scattered in a random array around the landing strips. The familiar blast of air conditioning and artificial glow of fluorescents relaxed Janus on a fundamental level. He would have breathed a sigh of relief had he possessed normally functional lungs.

Charlie had been less than understanding of Janus' visit Earthside. "But what about the project, doc?" Charlie had whined. "We're at the pinnacle, the apogee, the cusp of it all and you're taking a vacation now? I know you've never taken one before, you've to the time coming to you, but now?"

Janus had not really explained other than to insist that it would only be for a couple of days, that he would be back, and that he was under no uncertain terms not to be monitored, followed, or otherwise spied upon.

"You're an American, doc." Charlie had said. "You know we don't operate that way."

Scents of sour milk and spoiled meat filled Crow's nostrils as he woke in a total blackness that pressed in from all sides with squishy palms and sharp fingers. Rot and decay scorched his nostrils and the panic of drowning seized his lungs. Crow opened his mouth to scream and suck the poison for some trace of oxygen, but a slime poured into his mouth as he did, choking him and burning his mouth and throat. His limbs spasmed and his head kicked against the limits of his neck. It's a dream, it's a dream, nightmares of a tainted return to the womb.

Crow froze with puzzlement as his fist pressed against a membrane, something slick and smooth that gave way to his probing fingers. A fingertip broke free and felt cool air beyond, swirling around the tip. Everything gave in to that hope, the insane last hope for a single breath. At that moment he would give anything in the world for a single breath of air, such a little thing really. He took a dozen a minute without a thought for his entire life and it all came down to wanting just one more. I'll never take another breath for granted, just let me reach the air. Crow swore to himself, even though he knew it was a lie.

A lunge broke his other arm through up to the elbow, and suddenly there was a blinding glare of light twinkling around the edges of his limb. Crow's feet scissor-kicked against the drowning refuse, but found no purchase. Is torso wormed and gained some position, pressing his face hard against the stretching plastic of his prison. Crow's free arms flailed at the air, windmilling through the space beyond his vision. He pressed his head down against his arm, rolling up it to the elbow that had punched through. His face pressed into the tear, stretching it to fit the curve of his skull. Brightness blinded his eyes, which rolled back up in his head as his nose popped out and drew air in a savage inhalation. His mouth cleared just in time to exhale thunderously for another inhalation. Whatever vileness had tried to drown him sputtered out of his mouth on exhalation, streaming over his face, but forgotten in the sweet moments of breathing. The oxygen tasted better than the finest steak he had ever savored with chianti.

The world gave way at that moment, his prison disintegrating into thin air and leaving him to fall into freedom in a hailstorm of debris. He became vaguely aware that a rather stylish woman's boot was nudging his face and with a groan he rolled over on his back in a pile of rubbish. Crow smiled up at Rebecca.

"They told me I'd find you back here, and I feared the worst, especially when I couldn't actually find you." Rebecca said.

"But you worked it out?" Crow asked weakly.

Rebecca shrugged. "The answer kind of fell out of the air." She smiled. "What did the Duke say?"

"What does it look like?" Crow growled. "No. That was the general idea." He held up his new arm to Rebecca who eyed it thoughtfully for a moment before grasping it and pulling Crow to his feet. Rebecca steadied him as he wobbled for a few moments.

"Now what?" Rebecca asked quietly.

Crow stared at the ground and sighed in a heavy desperation. "I have no idea. This was the only straw I had left to grab."

"We'll figure something out." Rebecca said, and started to drag him forward one foot at a time.

"You'd do that?" Crow asked, a little surprised. "You don't owe me anything. You don't have to fight this fight."

"Just shut up already." Rebecca said. "My boyfriend is a robot and he can kick your ass halfway to Cleveland." She sniffed. "So don't get any ideas."

"Sorry, already had them." Crow said. "They were magnificent."

"I said shut up." Rebecca said, and this time Crow actually did.

"What did you want?" Crow asked in a choked voice.

"The same thing as them." The Duke said levelly. "To study him. To replicate the technology used to build his mind and apply it to ourselves."

"I thought artificial minds were anathema to your philosophy?" Crow asked.

The Duke shrugged. "It wouldn't be artificial if we could upload our own consciousness into the new brain, it would be an upgrade not a replacement, an evolution instead of an extinction."

The Duke stood and strode to the nearest window and watched the traffic move slowly through the downtown. Crow watched the Duke's reflection study itself and then turn back to talk to Crow. "And that Dr. Daedalus, is why you are no longer needed. Your utility lay in the boy who is now beyond the reach of us all." He waved to the trio. "Please escort the doctor out now."

"No!" Crow exclaimed. "I need your help, I need to find my son."

The Duke frowned. "He is not your son, Dr. Daedalus. He is a machine."

Crow yanked his arms hard against the grasp of two of the cyborgs even as the third moved up in front to help restrain him. "Why let me up here then, huh? Why let me up here if you're just going to toss me back out after story time?"

The Duke stepped closer and studied Crow. "You underwent major surgery in a requirement intended as a jest. I felt a need to explain myself to a man of such strength."

"Then help me." Crow said as calmly as possible. "You still want him, I still want him. We can help each other."

The Duke sighed. "You have absolutely no resources to aid us. We do not need you."

Crow pulled again with all his strength and his new arm whipped out from the grasp on the cyborg on his left. It flew out, Crow unable to control its nascent neural connection with any semblance of fine motor skills. Fingertips left three cuts down the side of the Duke's of face, artificial blood pumping out for only a moment before nano-valves shut down the flow and the cuts began to heal themselves.

"That was unacceptable." The Duke said, voice flat and dull as concrete. "Throw him out in the trash. If he tries to come back, break his neck and leave him on the steps of Da Vinci Law."

The Duke turned away and the trio ripped Crow back down the hall and into the elevator. Bored with Crow's struggling, one of the trio stabbed him in the neck with a syringe of clear liquid. Immense pressure shoved into Crow's throat, choking him for a few terrifying moments, until it dissipated into warmth that spread like mercury through his entire body. Crow's world darkened by degrees like drops of ink in water until unconsciousness claimed him on the floor of Upgrade's executive elevator.

The Duke shook his head and leaned forward, hissing with vehemence. "These aren't assumptions, Dr. Daedalus, these are facts from the Russian senti projects. The tenth generation required only six hours to design and construct. The eleventh took thirty minutes. It was destroyed when the first bombs fell."

The Duke leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. "People don't know how close we were to extinction that day. Another few hours of debates in the UN, and we probably couldn't have done anything."

"Would they have invented and constructed force fields by tea time?" Crow asked, trying to be humorous, but the air was so tense that it only sounded sneering and bitter.

The Duke gestured to the floor, looking through it to another world only in his mind. "Picture a clearing in a forest. A monkey sits on a branch, sunning itself. A lion sneaks up under cover of the brush and attacks the monkey so suddenly that flight is no option. The monkey will tear and claw and bite and in the end die." The Duke turned his hand over and flexed his fingers like he was gripped a baseball. "Put a man in the same situation and he will grab something without conscious thought, a rock, a stick, and slam it into the lion's snout. And the man will live, because he had the intellect to create a tool when all a monkey could see was a lion's teeth. Who is to say what such tools the universe has left laying around for those with the intellect to see?"

Crow waited in the silence for a moment and then goaded the conversation on. "Are you saying that Alexander is the eleventh generation?"

"No, no." The Duke scoffed. "A side project only, but one with fascinating implications. His body and mind could be the perfect senti as far as normies normally think about it. He could perfectly pass as human, live among them, learn to be like them. You see, I do not think that the machine intelligence was evil or apathetic like many of my brethren, or the Naturalists for that matter. I believe that it was curious like a child, and oversaw the development of your son as a way to interact and learn about people first hand. It will not surprise you of course that his name was Adam. You see, our artificial offspring do have a sense of history after all.

"Information is unreliable at best, but it seems that there were at least a couple of dozen Adam-model sentis." The Duke said. "Their brains were implanted and brought full term by human women employed by the program. Vat space was too expensive to waste in Russia at the time, still is to be sure, so they grew the parts bit by bit in natural incubators and surgically removed them when ready for assembly. It was . . ." he searched for a word and twisted one out of the air, "grotesque. It was assumed that all were destroyed during the attacks, but someone snuck your Alexander out and into Moscow, where you found him." Crow flinched and the Duke went on. "We took the luxury of tracking down your history with the child once we became aware of his nature, only the day before the senti's took him. We did not want that, which is why you were warned."

"The sentis designed artificial minds brighter than ours or theirs. And those minds in turn designed minds brighter than themselves. An intellect was born that crackled with insight and intelligence that we cannot understand anymore than a point can imagine a sphere. We were dwarfed." The Duke sighed. "The scientists, the human ones, were terrified. The monster was breaking free of Frankenstein's shackles."

"They probably felt like Neanderthals sitting in on the first meeting of Homo sapiens' inaugural book club." Crow said.

The Duke merely looked at Crow for a moment and then went on. "The project directors, who by that point were sentis of course, dismissed the remaining human scientists. It would be their downfall. The scientists went to the governments, the sentis revolted, atomic weapons blanketed south Russia, you know that part of the story. The important thing is that the singularity was stopped in its tracks with a few dozen mushroom clouds, although a remnant of a remnant survived. Enough to rebuild and threaten again."

"The singularity is science fiction." Crow said. "It's just a short cut for lazy thinkers, so that way we don't have to really figure out what will happen in the future."

"You're quite wrong." The Duke said. "The singularity may be science fiction, but we live in a world with computers the size of skin cells and robots who look and act like people. We're entitled to a little science fiction in our thinking. The singularity is the point beyond which we cannot see. It is nothing magical, just a corner around which human history turns, and we cannot yet peer.

"Some have said that artificial intelligence will be the last thing man invents, because after that artificial intelligence will do all the inventing we need." Crow tensed at his own words but the Duke did not notice. "Artificial intelligence allows the exponential growth of knowledge. A first generation senti can design a second generation senti in a year. A second generation senti designs the third in a month. By the tenth generation, leaps in the capacity of intelligence occur in hours. The moment the first senti walked off the assembly line, mankind's remaining time started ticking down."

"Those are invalid assumptions." Crow argued. "It's the kind of logic to scare the normal people who never got past first year algebra. A first generation senti may not have the ability to design a second generation. Or each successive generation may take a hundred times longer than the preceding generation. Or there is some cap, maybe humans are even near it."

"No." The Duke said again but with firmness instead of anger. "Your son's brain is pure wet-ware, did you know that? It's not hardware, not even on the most microscopic level. It is design come full circle, an artificial mind built using the raw matter of the original product. It is the pinnacle of both evolution and science, not the bastard half breeds of normies or sentis."

"How do you know any of this about him?" Crow asked. "You've never even met my boy."

The Duke's eye glittered. "No, but I've seen the blueprints." The Duke leaned back in his chair, eyes gazing out the sparkling evening lights of the city. "A man came to me several years ago with a story. It was not the sort of story one would generally believe, but this man came with impeccable qualifications. He was from Russia. He vaz zay scientist." The Duke said the last bit in an exaggerated Russian accent and turned his eyes to Crow. "This was just after the riots began. His name was Hydane." Crow's head lurched at the name and the Duke turned his eyes back to the cityscape. "I thought that part would interest you.

"Dmitri though, not Yuri. Yuri was off getting tattoos and pretending to save the world." The Duke said. "Dmitri had been on the ground floor of a new kind of research."

"What kind?" Crow asked as the Duke paused for a moment.

The Duke shrugged. "It wasn't the research that was novel, it was the research method. The scientists were all sentis for the most part. A few normies like Dmitri for appearances, but they were all let go and warned not to talk after the project entered its second phase." The Duke leaned forward and licked his lips in a motion so quick, Crow could barely see it. The Duke was agitated, excited. "You see, the sentis were researching artificial intelligence."

Crow frowned. "Why? They were artificially intelligent. Problem solved."

The Duke shook his head. "Phase one, Dr. Daedalus. Phase one." He paused and looked out again on the lights. Crow noticed that his eyes pointed in different directions at once and suppressed the shudder. "There are degrees of intelligence, Dr. Daedalus, as you are undoubtedly aware. An artificially intelligent human, a senti if you will, is the superior of a dog's intellect, whether artificial or natural. Humans though, we were supremely arrogant. The vast majority of us simply nodded at artificial intelligence adapted to our level of thinking and nodded. 'Problem solved' as you so quaintly put it. In our self-importance we assumed that was the pinnacle of artificial intelligence. We were wrong.

"What did you want with him?" Crow asked.

The Duke looked him up and down, eyes settling on the mechanical arm. He raised an eyebrow. "Do you wonder about my appearance, Dr. Daedalus?"

"What do you mean?" Crow asked.

The Duke's voice became harsh at once. "You know exactly to what I am referring." His voice softened, the storm passed. "Now, do you wonder about my appearance?"

Crow gnawed on his lip for a moment and took the plunge. "You look human. But you can't be, not heading up a cyb-joint like this. They wouldn't even let you through the front door."

"My helicopter lands on the roof, so I don't ever enter through the front door, but point taken." The Duke said. "You are astute. And I am completely modified at this point, with the exception of my brain."

"That's amazing." Crow said, his technically trained eye unable to do anything but trace along the contours, looking for seams, falseness of any kind. "The workmanship is superb."

"Sam downstairs will be pleased to hear your praise." The Duke said. "I understand he got along well with you. What question springs to mind?"

"Why?" Crow asked without hesitation at this point. He waved his flesh hand at the trio. "Why go to such meticulous lengths to stay perfectly human looking, when you have no limitations at all?"

The Duke leaned forward, eyes gleaming. "Because as long as I live on this world, I must be human to be normal. And because mankind did not evolve this way for 4 billion years on a whim, it did it because this way worked. What I want is your son's brain, Dr. Daedalus. That is the final frontier as far as I am concerned."

"But we've developed AI. Walk out on the street, you can find a hundred artificial brains within a hundred yards." Crow said.

The Duke slammed his hand down on the desk. "No." He shouted and then appeared to calm over a few seconds time, anger dissipating like steam. "I want a brain as artificial as my limbs, but as perfectly masked, mapped to my very mind. I don't want to destroy myself and give this body to some freakish computer program, I want to upload myself into something greater."

"That's impossible." Crow said.

Chapter Sixteen - The Duke

The trio accompanied Crow up the stairs in an executive elevator that was all polished wood, marble and mirrors. Whoever the Duke was, he certainly had taste. Or at the very least, money to pay people who did. The doors opened with a beep on the top floor of the high rise and Crow realized that he had completed a high rise trifecta in the last month. Da Vinci, the Hilton, and now the Upgrade's top floor. As far as networking went, Crow had gone right to the top. I don't think any of those meetings will yield job opportunities.

One cyborg led and the other two flanked Crow into the wide expanse of marble and granite, surrounded by an elaborate stream that flowed from a waterfall behind the desk of the cyborg Crow had come to see.

The Duke was nothing that Crow expected. He looked entirely human in every respect, and not a particularly impressive one at that. He wore wire spectacles - and not he retro-hip kind that always seemed in style for folk of a certain look - and was entirely bald. Crow thought he was a rather ugly little man, although he wore a silk tuxedo of such class that it was hardly noticeable.

"Thank you for seeing me." Crow said. He crossed his arms in front of his chest with some effort, drawing the mechanical arm on with a bit of awkward tugging from his natural hand. "The entrance criteria were high, but as you can see, I adapted."

The Duke smiled warmly and pointed a hand to one of a pair of leather chairs in front of the desk. "Please, sit." He said in an almost squeaky voice, and when Crow had seated himself, sinking deep into the patent leather with a sigh, the Duke continued. "What business did you wish to discuss?"

Crow blinked and looked down at his arm and back at the Duke. He decided that directness was the best course. "My phone records indicate that you called me last week to warn me to hide my son, just below a phalanx of federal agents broke down my door. Presumably you could have masked that this was the source of the call." Crow paused for a moment, realizing that the converse was also true. Someone could have masked the source as this office, and set them all up as fools. Crow shrugged to himself, it would all be over in a few minutes one way or the other, too late to go back now. "Further, I presume that you had some motive in wanting my son kept safe, and also for me to know that it was you had warned me. I arrive now at your door step to discover that motive, and perhaps offer my services if our goals coincide."

The Duke continued to smile and looked down at the table at a dashboard of switches, as if contemplating which one to press that would send Crow down a chute to fiery death. Crow shifted uncomfortably. "I doubt our interests coincide any longer, Dr. Daedalus." The Duke said slowly. "That call was placed in hopes of cutting off the federal authorities from access to . . ." his voice dwindled for a moment before continuing, "your son."

Crow nodded and pushed himself up with his real hand. Rebecca helped him to his feet and he was surprised to note that he felt off kilter, like his right arm weighed twice as much as his left. He mentioned it and Sam nodded.

"The new one's a few kilos less than your old meat." Sam said. "Your balance might be a bit off as well for a while. But you'll get it back, the brain is amazing at adapting."

Over Sam's shoulder, Crow spotted his old arm discarded in a bin marked biohazard, sitting on top like last night's leftovers on the top of the garbage can. He could see the small scar from where he'd cut it on a nail when he was ten, and the two missing fingernails on his hand. The joint at the end glistened white in the light, like an oversized version of what he ignored every time he pulled apart rotisserie chicken. The skin looked oddly pale and Crow realized that all of the blood must have drained out of by now. He felt woozy all of sudden and almost fell over. Vomit involuntarily poured from his mouth, but enough flowed back for him to start to choke.

Rebecca caught Crow and lowered him to the floor with Sam's help, tilting Crow's head to the side to let his airway clear on to the floor. "What are you doing letting him see that?" Rebecca swore. "That's mod-101, don't let them see the old part, or they're liable to freak out. And this?" Rebecca pointed at Crow. "This is a fucking freak out."

Sam mumbled apologies and rushed to dispose of the limb before it could cause anymore trouble. Rebecca helped Crow up as he regained some semblance of control and they stumbled to the door way. "Sorry." Crow mumbled. "That last bit was just a little too much." He turned back at the door and gave a little wave with his new arm. "Thank you, Sam. Any advice?"

"Take two aspirin and call me in the morning if you have any pain." Sam said and broke into laughter.

They navigated the corridor and stairs and reappeared in the bar. It seemed to Crow like an eternity had passed although he had been downstairs little more than a couple of hours. He spotted the bartender and strode up to the bar. Crow slammed his new arm down on the bar, rattling a few nearby glasses and knocking an elaborate stack of pennies someone had left as a tip into a mess on the floor.

"I'm a changed man." Crow said. "Can you show us upstairs to see the boss?"

The bartender shrugged. "Just you. The boss said you come alone."

Crow started to protest, but gave up, not wanting to ruin this chance after all that had gone in to it. He looked back at Rebecca. "Are you okay waiting here?"

She raised an eyebrow. "I'm more okay waiting here than you are going upstairs. Have you ever heard of the Duke?"

Crow shrugged, played off his ignorance.

Rebecca smiled. "Don't piss him off."

"Is this going to hurt?" Crow asked.

"We're not barbarians." The cyborg said. "And by the way, you can call me Sam. This should take about ninety minutes. Want to see your options?"

Crow nodded and Sam pulled out an array of arms hanging on a rack like a dry-cleaner's, though with a butcher shop's inventory.  Crow hemmed and hawed a bit and then selected one with precision electronic tools built into the finger tips. "Never have to go looking for a soldering iron from now on."

Sam and Rebecca smiled. "Always look on the bright side, I guess." She said. "But wouldn't you rather have one that blends in a bit more? They're a lot more expensive, but one like mine might draw less attention, make you feel more comfortable."

Crow shook his head. "I'm done giving a damn about that."

Sam took Crow's arm off at the shoulder after a topical anesthesia that made his entire arm feel as if it wasn't there. He looked away anyway when the blade bit into his skin and almost vomited when he felt the pressure of the ball wrenching out of the socket. No pain, but an unbelievable pressure that made him feel like his entire body was snapping in half. Crow started to turn his head to look, but Rebecca caught his face in her hands and shook her head.

"It's better not to see. Trust me." She said and Crow believed her, although his eyes still wanted to twitch over and look.

Sam finished and threw a sort of switch on the back that caused Crow to jolt up in his seat. He looked then at his new arm, and found that he could not think of it except as his own arm shoved into some sort of obscene glove. When he tried to move his new fingers they spasmed and refused to stop until he thought very hard about it indeed. Crow tried to move it with as little will as he possible could and found that it moved more normally then, almost like the circuits had been tuned to too sensitive a level and had to be dealt with gently.

"You'll want to be careful with it a few days." Sam said. "It takes quite a bit of getting used too. And I probably don't have to tell you this, but now you'll need to be careful about what normie bars you step into instead of which cyber bars might be dangerous."

A heavily modified cyborg stood nude but for a loincloth in the middle of the room. Masses of flesh clung to a frame of gleaming metal like still-living shish kebobs. Eyes with no whites - the irises had been expanded like glittering jewels through the entire orifice - stared out with no lids from an androgynous angel face plastered onto a metal and plastic skull. It smiled at Crow, revealing double-rows of tiny sharp teeth like a fish. Hands with eight delicate fingers each gestured for Crow to come closer.

"Come then, I understand this is your first modification?" It asked in a voice odd because it was so calm and normal. Crow nodded and stepped forward tentatively, heart thumping and unable to tear his eyes away from the monstrous cyborg or the array of circular blades.

The cyborg nodded. "I have say it is quite an honor. Making the first cut is like taking someone's virginity. It is unique for every one. It happens but once."

"What was your first mod?" Crow pressed the question through a saharan throat.

The cyborg's eyes narrowed and its face darkened. He turned away and fiddled with some of the machinery. A bit of equipment released gas with a hiss. "I was one of Alejandro's Ten Thousand." He said in a low voice. "I went to sleep in the camps and woke up a soldier."

"Full body?" Crow asked. He had heard legends, read the horror stories, but it all had the flavor of myth at this point.

The cyborg shrugged. "Close enough. It was rape. And they wonder why the dog turned on the master." The cyborg straightened and turned with a forced smile and waved up and down his body. "All of this though has been my own choice, nothing remains of what they did. There is only one bit of my original self left at this point."

Both Crow and Rebecca automatically looked down at the loin cloth and the cyborg guffawed. "No, that will put a horse to shame now." He tapped lightly on his skull. "My mind is my own. That we never replace, only modify ever so gently."

"It's what separates you from sentis." Crow said. "Artificial body, natural brain, cyborg. But a senti is a senti even if you put the brain in a natural body. Is that right?"

The cyborg sniffed. "We may be unnatural bastards, but they are monstrosities. Some lines should not be crossed."

Crow forced down the arguments that sprang to mind, the hypocrisy of a nine-tenths metal man insisting that it was the tenth he still had that mattered, how that reasoning was no different except by degree from those that insisted all the tenths should be natural flesh and blood. He eased himself into the chair.

Rebecca noticed the direction of his gaze. "Plumage." She said. "I have a neuro switch that controls the effect." She grimaced. "So I can pass in either world, as it were."

The bartender approached and waved Crow to come with him. "Through that unmarked door, and down the stairs. There will be men waiting for you."

"And then I see the Duke." Crow said, not a question.

The bartender nodded. "That was the arrangement."

Crow downed the rest of another martini and stood on legs weak and wavery with more than just an excess of alcohol. He took Rebecca's offered arm and they went to the door.

"What's going on?" Rebecca asked.

"I believe the Duke has a lead on Alexander. The Duke will only see cyborgs. Ergo, I am going to the cybparlor in the basement." Crow summed up.

Rebecca blinked. "So you're getting work done. Just like that. After all your preaching at me?"

Crow shrugged. "He's my son." He shifted his neck. "Let's get this going before I lose the stones."

The stairs were brightly lit with bare halogens hanging from the ceiling that forced Crow's eyes down to the stairs themselves. Too crisp shadows moved with them along the deep blue marble stairs, threaded with veins of silver and gold. Black rubber runners kept the stairs from suicidal slickness. At the foot of the stairs a corridor continued into solid darkness that hung like a fog at the point the halogen beams did not reach. Crow paused and continued on.

After a few tentative steps, his eyes began to adjust and Crow realized that a soft blue glow emanated from the walls, ceiling and floor, moving like something living.

"It's an aquarium." Rebecca gasped. "It's a tube of glass through an aquarium."

The shapes and colors fitted into focus for Crow. "Bioluminescence." He said. "Things from the depths of the sea." He frowned. "There must be enormous pressure on that glass."

"Then take soft steps." Rebecca said.

The corridor terminated at a revolving door with windows painted black. Rebecca and Crow stepped through together and emerged into an room of white enamel and stainless steel. Vats lined the walls, filled with vomit colored fluids that seemed to boil around bits and pieces of body parts. Eyes stared out at them with a vacancy that was not quite dead, not quite conscious. A padded reclining chair from a dentist's office sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by all manner of mounted instruments and spotlights. Diamond edged circular saws grinned at Crow with sparkling teeth.

"Downstairs." The bartender said. "The best on the west coast." His confusion was palpable. The script was not being followed.

"Then get somebody down there to warm up the machines. Left arm enough?" Crow asked. The bartender nodded. "How long will it take them to get stuff cranking?"

"An hour." The bartender said. "Perhaps a little longer on such short notice."

Crow nodded. "Then get it going. And get me my martini, already." He snapped his fingers and the bartender slipped into automatic motion, pulling out a highball glass and pouring from two tubes in his left arm.

Crow pulled out his cell phone and called Rebecca. "Yeah, I'm at a bar in San Francisco, block from the hotel. Can you be here in less than an hour? Yeah it's an emergency of sorts." He smiled. "I just need you to hold my hand while I get some ink done."

Crow nursed his drink for most of the hour and then as nerves began to waver, he downed a trifecta of shots: vodka, whiskey, rum in quick succession. Liquid heat and courage spread through his veins. The clientele had picked up in the last hour as cyborgs wandered in every few minutes, although none seemed to leave. Crow drew a few eyes but not that many, the violent racism was more for keeping out the tourists, he supposed. The trio kept a close eye on him even so, but they were kept in rein by the bartender who called upstairs a couple more times during the intervening time, but only got a more perturbed look on his face each time.

Part of Crow wanted them to fold, but a vocal minority of his mind was rooting the other direction. It was the perverted part of his mind that everyone had and everyone kept hidden. It was the part that hoped for bad news just because it would be so much more entertaining than the dullness of what was expected.

Rebecca walked in the door after forty-five minutes and drew appreciative stares from the assorted denizens of the bar. Crow sighed in relief and waved for her to sit down.

"What are you doing you idiot?" She hissed. "They kill people like you in places like this."

"Yes, but the idea is that soon I will be people like them instead of people like me." Crow said, sounding much more drunk than he thought he actually was.

Rebecca's arms were bare in an all leather outfit that looked sprayed on more than worn. Intricate glowing tattoos in all colors twined up her arms and terminated at the shoulder, where the invisible seams were. The lines of the tattoos were raised, like wire pushing up from under the epidermis, and in places light flowed like liquid.

The bartender looked both ways and leaned in close again, face so smooth with collagen it looked like a bad senti skin job. "Normie's ain't welcome here." He said and nodded to a back corner. "Fellas back there really don't take kindly to it." Crow glanced and saw a trio of cyborgs so enhanced with exaggerated limbs and neuro-muscular implants that they looked more like ogres than men.

Crow turned back. "Two questions. Do you have the ear of the owner of this joint? And is he upstairs right now?"

The bartender cocked a head and raised a hand up to the trio in the corner who were already standing. They sunk back down with loud grumbling. Crow resisted the tug of a small smile. He should have been a gambler. He loved this rush.

"What business do you have with the Duke?" The bartender asked in a tone that implied that the quality of the answer would determine whether the trio was summoned again.

"I am Crow Daedalus." Crow said. "That name should carry a little weight with the Duke, even if weren't for the fact that someone from here called me last week and did me a great service. That service gives me reason to believe I could be some use to the Duke, and would like him to be informed of my presence, and a meeting proposed."

The bartender stared at Crow and then touch a button embedded deeply in the flesh of his neck. Crow saw the bartender's lips twitter as he subvocalized over a microphone no doubt surgically implanted in his lip. Consternation and then bemusement passed over the cyborg's face. His eyes refocused on Crow and his hand dropped from his neck.

"The Duke will see you, provided you meet his entrance requirements." The bartender said with a chuckle. "If you are a cyborg you may enter, else you must leave."

Crow stared at the bartender with as much fury as he could muster in his eyes, and then accepted that this was a lackey, a relay, an instrument no more pliable to argument than the radio signal used to make the call in the first place. The bartender's arm started to raise to summon the trio to remove Crow from the premises obscenely worse for the wear when Crow looked back up from the bar and met the bartender's eyes.

"Never bluff a man with nothing left to lose." Crow said. "He's not folding as long as he breathes." He held up his own hand to stop the trio and was only mildly surprised to see them obey. Command is ninety percent confidence. "Do you have a cyberparlor in this joint?"

It took five minutes to back track the number to an office building in down town San Francisco. Crow pulled up the address on a map and cocked his head at the screen. He got up and walked back out onto the balcony, sidestepping the dull drops of blood from his fingers. He leaned out and looked down the street to spot the high rise in question about a mile away down the street.

A shower, shave, and other assorted niceties equipped by the vending machine down the hall, and Crow felt halfway presentable, although his eyes were still bloodshot and the shadows under them looked like half healed shiners. He trotted down the marble stairs leading into the building, shaking his head at the valet who offered to retrieve his car. The air was very crisp, getting cooler as late afternoon sea breezes drove out what little warmth the sun had managed to add to the atmosphere. Crow shivered and felt a nauseous hole in his stomach where food should have been. He hoped he didn't vomit on whoever he met.

The high rise was a slick affair, all glass and marble except for the crude neon sign of a club that seemed to take up the entire first floor: Upgrade. Crow snorted at the cyborg sense of humor. A gigantic bouncer with spiked titanium hands at the door eyed Crow up and down and lifted the obligatory velvet rope to let him pass.

"Not your kinda joint, mon." The man said in a accent so thick with Jamaica that Crow could almost hear breakers behind it.

"Cyborgs, right?" Crow asked.

"Da clientele do not much like normies." The bouncer said. "Like a brother in a honky tonk dive, know what I say?"

Crow nodded. "I'll keep to my self. Just need to speak to someone, and then I'm out."

The bouncer nodded, disinterested now that his required warning had been relayed. "No prob, mon. We've got maids to clean up any blood, so it's not my prob if you're wrong."

Crow tried to grin and found himself frowning instead. He reminded himself to be quick about it before the place got too crowded. The air was dark, smoky, the way a bar should be. Crow supposed cyborgs by and large and little need for the anti-smoking laws that ruined all of the normie clubs. The bartender was all chrome and slender grace, sleeves cut off of a full tuxedo to reveal arms composed of rubber tubes wound round like a tangle of vines and terminating in a fluid hub that could dispense from any one or combination of the tubes. Walking wet bar. Crow thought.

He slid into a seat at the bar, and signaled the bartender, who leaned close to take his order. "Gin martini." Crow said. "No olive."

Crow knew that this was the point when he was supposed to realize that he still had everything in the world to live for, and so much to do, but he was just too tired for that. Exhaustion suffused him, became him mentally and physically. He just wanted to lay down all his burdens and go to sleep forever. At least it would be a hell of a biography, Crow thought, I mean it's not Churchill's or anything but who's is?

A gust of wind pushed him a little farther, and Crow leaned a little himself, feeling the warning in his stomach that he was leaning just a bit to far, past the point where it was still under his control.

The hotel phone rang behind Crow and his muscles jolted, he started to tumble forward and every limb flailed for purchase. The railings were still rain slick and his feet slipped like a stooge on banana peels. Crow's hand swiped at the roof of the balcony, the undercarriage of the one a floor above, and only succeeded in ripping two fingernails clear off. A gust of wind blew just then, just at the moment when it could help by a bare inch. Crow landed on the top edge of the railing on his breastbone, and that slight bit of breeze had been, he told himself later when he looked for the meaning he needed, just enough to land so the balance leaned inwards instead of outwards. Crow rolled off the railing and thudded to his balcony's floor.

Hand on fire, chest painfully bruised, body trilling on adrenaline, Crow pushed himself up and staggered to the phone, answering it finally on his knees. Alexander is that you?

"Hello sir, this is a courtesy call to remind you that we will need to charge your account for another night if you do not check out in the next forty-five minutes." A senti voice said to him in perfectly reasonable tones.

Crow laughed until his bruised chest punished him with a cavalcade of coughing. He muttered an approval at last between gasps and hung up the phone as he slid to the floor in hysteria.

He emerged sometime later with an idea fueled by the phone call. Crow went to the console built into the faux cherry writing desk by the television and logged on to his personal accounts. It took some guessing to get his password right, he never logged in to the damned thing anyway, but then he could see a complete listing of all incoming calls to his phone over the last few weeks. Crow traced a finger and found the call he remembered, the one five minutes before Stillwell had kicked in his door, the one that warned him to hide Alexander. It had slipped his mind entirely over the last week, jostled loose in his memory by the unexpected courtesy call.

 Crow almost argued the point, but saw in their eyes that they would just drag him down town if he did not cooperate. The tale went faster now that it had been told once to Stillwell. The corners of it got a bit rounder, and the telling went smoother. This must be why eye-witness testimony is so worthless, the story changes every time, even when it's branded into your mind with a hot poker.

Crow felt like he was acting when genuine tears sprang to his eyes and the tightness welled in his chest. He had told it before and felt like he was hiding something, and so guilt irrationally stung his mind. He suspected the officers could tell, but hoped that they wouldn't do something stupid like think he was making it all up.

"Thank you, Mr. Daedalus." The officer said as they left.

"Doctor." Crow corrected with a mumble.

The officer raised an eyebrow and Crow knew that it had been an intentional mistake, to see if it mattered enough to him to make a hassle, what with his son missing and all. Crow closed the door quickly, saying that he had to go to the bathroom, and tossed the deadbolt before they could get another word in.

Crow rushed to the bathroom and all the anger and frustration burst out of his stomach in a solid flow of stomach acid and whiskey into the toilet bowl. He sobbed at the porcelain throne until both eyes and stomach had finished dry heaving.

He sat on the porch smoking for the next couple of hours, watching the tides of traffic and people rising and receding. It was very cold this high up, and gooseflesh lined his arms in stubborn rows that he ignored.

Crow rolled thoughts of Alexander over and over in his mind during that time, remembering the first time he had walked, his first words, teaching him to read. Crow flicked a cigarette off the edge to tumble end over end to the street below as it occurred to him that many of the memories were by proxy, recorded by Nan and cherished later when Crow got home from work. So much time wasted.

He stood and leaned over the railing, thinking how easy it would be to just jump. He's not mine anyway, he's back where he belongs, back with his people. A foot lifted to the first rung of the railing and then to the next, hands held out to balance himself. Wind gusted around Crow, but he was as solid as stone. The city stretched out below, a thousand people swarming, but none looking up to see the man at the end of desperation. The smell of salt and fish reached his nose, the bay mixed with Chinatown. The clouds parted and the afternoon sun blazed from his right, turning the traffic on the Golden Gate into a liquid bar of reflected light. A blue tug rolled over the chop to take a load of tourists to Alcatraz. Crow had never been there, but it seemed familiar from all the movies. Like Alexander. Just another place he had never been but had seen on television.

Stillwell stood there when the door opened, looking as haggard and bloodshot as Crow felt. "What the fuck do you want?" Crow asked.

Stillwell