It was just falling dusk as they made their way through Crofton. The front lawns of all the houses had gone to hay, about knee-high, and there wasn’t a single electric light on anywhere. Even the streetlights were dark. The robots must have figured, Why waste the bulbs?, and took them with them. Otherwise, it was hard to know the town was deserted. The houses had been inhabited recently enough that they’d yet to show signs of ruin. A United States flag hung from a flagpole in front of one home. Solar panels remained on many roofs, harder to take away than lightbulbs. Porch furniture waited loyally for sitters that would never come. Laughton could never decide if the robots had afforded humans so much land to humor the pro-orgos, who thought consolidating humans would encourage a population boom that’d require space to grow into, or if the machines just wanted a wide cushion zone.

The two policemen didn’t know where Smythe had been living, so they meandered up and down the backstreets, Mathews driving manually. He turned on the headlights, then about twenty minutes later, the brights. The lights turned the hay a yellow white, and the black shadows of the houses rising from the wild lawns made Laughton think of old pictures he’d seen of elephants on the savannah, although he didn’t know how big elephants had really been and couldn’t imagine an animal that large.

The chief’s headache had receded just enough to be nagging instead of debilitating. He kept rubbing his face to stay awake. When he saw the glow of artificial lights one street over, he exhaled in relief. “There,” he said.

Mathews looked, and then gunned the engine, pulling around the corner on screeching tires.

“Jesus, Mathews,” Laughton said.

“Sorry.”

The house was a plain, bloated, two-story box, probably a hundred years old, from a time when size was more important than style. The light escaping from the open windows showed rows of solar panels covering the front lawn and the lawns of both neighbors. Thick wires hung from the roof where there must have been another array. The solar panels explained how Smythe and Sam could afford the extravagant show of light, but that many solar panels weren’t just being used for nighttime illumination. Something was happening in the house.

“Looks like Sam hasn’t gone anywhere,” Mathews said.

“Looks it.”

“How do you want to do this?”

The chief opened his door. “We’re just going to have a conversation,” he said, stepping down from the truck. Mathews got out on the other side, and they slammed the doors. No need to worry about alerting the man. They were about to knock.

As the men made their way down the narrow path, a backlit silhouette appeared in one of the front windows, peering out to see who had arrived. It moved quickly away from the window at the sight of them. They opened the storm door, and Laughton banged on the front door with the side of his closed fist. Mathews turned on his body camera. The chief still liked to take notes with a stylus and oversize phone. “Look,” Mathews said, a smile in his voice. Laughton looked and saw the calm, slow pulses of fireflies hovering among the solar panels.

The door swung open. The chief squinted against the sudden brightness, which stabbed him in the right eye. A rail-thin man in his early thirties stood looking at them. He wore glasses with no bottom rims, and had his hair in a ponytail, stray wisps floating around his head. A tattoo graced the inside of his forearm, something in fancy calligraphy that the chief couldn’t read.

“Yes?” the man said, his tone an attempt at being calm but ruined by a note of defensiveness.

Mathews was in uniform. Laughton took his badge folder from his rear pocket, and flipped it open for the man to see. “This is Officer Mathews. I’m Chief Laughton. May we come in?”

The man hesitated, seeming on the verge of asking a question, but then stepped back and said, “Sure, okay.”

The policemen stepped by him into a small but cavernous entryway, the ceiling extending up to the second story. A carpeted room to the left was filled with industrial metal shelving laden with row after row of chunky, gamer-level computer towers, each with a small green LED eye assuring it was on. It was hot inside, despite the open windows. The combined noise of the computers’ cooling fans sounded like rushing water.

“That’s a lot of hardware,” Mathews said, turning his body so the camera was sure to pick it up.

“Yeah,” the man said with a nervous, embarrassed laugh.

“What’s your name, sir?” Chief Laughton said, getting out his phone and opening a new note.

“Sam McCardy,” he said. “Samuel.”

“And you live here with Carl Smythe.”

“We’re business partners.”

“What’s your business?” Mathews said.

McCardy looked like he could punch himself. “Computers,” he said.

Mathews snuffed in amusement.

“When was the last time you saw Mr. Smythe?” Laughton asked.

“I don’t know,” McCardy said. “Lunchtime? Right before lunch.”

“What time was that?”

The man’s brow screwed up in serious contemplation. He shook his head. “Eleven.” He shrugged. “I really don’t know. Did something happen with Carl?”

“As a matter of fact,” Laughton said, “he’s dead.”

McCardy went white, his whole body slumping, his breathing grew shallow, and his mouth screwed up, the look of a man who was refusing to allow himself to cry. He tested out his voice, and it came out cracked. “How?” Just the one word.

screwed-up lips, lower eyelids narrowed—grief

“Mr. McCardy. Could we come in, maybe sit down?” Chief Laughton said. The grief seemed genuine, but there was a flash of fear in the brow. Not uncommon given the situation, but suppressed faster than Laughton would have expected.

“Yeah,” McCardy said, nodding, looking at the ground, looking at nothing. “Sure. Yeah.” He stepped back, and then turned, leading them through a small passage into a combined kitchen–living room space. Here there was more industrial shelving surrounding two large folding tables in the center of the room, each with three flat-panel monitors, multiple VR headsets, keyboards, enormous speakers on stands, and what looked like large soundboards with rows of tiny dials. The shelving was not given over entirely to computers, though. There was a retro-gaming rig with some antique consoles going back to the twentieth century. Chief Laughton recognized a few consoles from his father’s collection with a pang of nostalgia. Confusingly, there were two racks stuffed with books—real, antique, paper books—more than Laughton had ever seen outside of a museum. More than he’d ever seen inside a museum.

But of course, the thing that drew his eye was bins filled with different-colored memory sticks, the kind that was used for sims. Each bin was marked with masking tape on which code names were written: Dikdik, Mollies, Starburst, The Bat. Chief Laughton still did not understand why sims remained a physical medium. The programming—human or robot—the manufacture of memory sticks, the distribution, the porting, the whole physical supply chain necessary for human drugs seemed like a reckless danger for something that could be handled in code remotely. He understood that sims were written in such a way that they deleted both from the memory stick and from the robot’s short-term memory as the program ran so that no copy of the program was retained, making it onetime use. That, of course, was necessary if it was going to be a salable commodity, but also, it seemed, was preferable to robots, because it meant that the experience could not be repeated, especially since a well-written sim filled in elements taken from the external environment and the robot’s memory, making each experience of the sim unique. But none of those things seemed to make physical memory sticks essential, based on his human understanding of the experience.

Sometimes Laughton wondered if the whole illegal-sims operation took the shape it did to purposely ape historical human drug trafficking, if the construct of the illegal behaviors around the act of sims use was an intrinsic part of a robot’s enjoyment of the experience.

They all looked at the setup for a moment in silence, as though even McCardy needed to take it in.

Laughton stepped into the room, and Mathews said to McCardy, “You want to sit down?”

McCardy nodded, and in a daze went to one of the desk chairs in the center of the room. “What the hell happened?” he said.

“We’re trying to figure that out,” Mathews said.

“I mean, what the hell happened?” McCardy said again.

“What do you mean?” Mathews said.

Chief Laughton watched McCardy’s face, and said, “He was murdered.”

eyes closed, lips tightened—pain

“No,” McCardy said, shaking his head. “No, no, no, no.”

“Is there someone who would have wanted to hurt him?” Mathews said.

“No. Wait. Of course. Look at this shit.” He looked back and forth at the policemen. “It’s all legal,” he hurried to say, not fooling anyone, “of course, all legal. But you know. Sims…”

Laughton walked over to the rack of books and pulled one off the shelf at random. Blended Worlds. He pulled a few more out. The Hidden Triangle. The Twenty-Year Death. He’d never heard of any of them. The things seemed one step away from dust.

“Did you know that Mr. Smythe was a cyborg?” Mathews said.

“Yeah. Of course. What does that matter? You think it was because he was a cyborg?”

“It’s possible. Are you a cyborg?”

McCardy jerked back like he’d tasted something unexpectedly bad. “What? No. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. They’re humans first. They have the same rights to be on the preserve, and everything.”

“No one’s saying anything against cyborgs,” Chief Laughton said, putting the books back on the shelf. “Where’d you get all of these books?”

“What does it fucking matter?” The shock over his friend’s death had turned to anger, eyebrows lowered, pulled together.

“I’ve just never seen so many books. Why do you have them?”

“Metals like human-written sims because of the messed-up shit we can think up that they can’t. Old books give us a lot of stuff to use. Those are all crap books that no one thought were worth digitizing, so metals have never seen them.”

“Who’s your distributor?” Mathews said.

McCardy turned back to the officer, caught off balance between the two men. He hesitated.

“Look, we don’t care about your sims,” Laughton said. “We’re not here to bust anyone on sims. That’s a metals problem, not a preserve problem as far as I’m concerned. But we need to find who killed your friend. And we need the names of anyone who might be able to help.”

McCardy’s shoulders slumped. “Something Jones. Carl handled all of that, and he just always said Jones. Crap, what am I going to do now?”

Laughton met Mathews’s eyes. The officer gave a slight shake of the head; he didn’t know the name Jones either.

“Was he in town to meet Jones?”

“No, he’d just gone for groceries.”

“And you stayed here?”

“Yes.”

“You were here all day? Didn’t go to town too?”

“I haven’t left the house.” He said it matter-of-factly, without the insistence of someone trying to establish an alibi. He didn’t even seem to consider that was what was being asked.

“Did Carl have family?” Laughton said.

“Just a sister. His dad died when he was little. His mom was killed in a car crash. That’s how he lost his arm and leg. He isn’t some modder,” he said, defending his friend. “He actually needs those prosthetics.”

“Does his sister live on the preserve?”

McCardy shook his head. “Oakland. She was paralyzed in the crash. She’s more machine than orgo. Says she’s happier out there.”

If she’d been paralyzed, there was no way she could blend. Despite McCardy’s egalitarianism, a cyborg that couldn’t blend wouldn’t be particularly popular on the preserve.

“Friends? Anyone else we should talk to?”

“I don’t know,” McCardy said. “Some robots, before we moved to the preserve. He did all of the runs into town. Maybe he knew some people there.”

“Yeah. Okay,” Laughton said. “What’s his sister’s name?”

“Cindy.”

“Do you have her contact info? We couldn’t find Smythe’s phone.”

McCardy fumbled for the phone on his desk, swiped through, and then looking up at the chief, extended his phone.

Laughton caught Mathews’s eye and gave a slight nod. The junior officer took his own phone and tapped it to McCardy’s.

“I’m giving you my info too,” Mathews said, “if you think of anything else once we leave…”

McCardy nodded.

“He didn’t leave his phone here, by any chance, did he?”

McCardy frowned, and shook his head. “No.”

“We’ll need to go through Mr. Smythe’s computer,” Chief Laughton said.

“I don’t know the password.”

“We’ll get experts out here tomorrow to go through it all.”

“Tomorrow,” McCardy repeated, not a question, just a sound.

“You sure there’s no way you could get in, maybe help us out.”

“Carl perfected the burner, a program that literally sets a computer on fire. If he didn’t want anyone on his machine, there’s no way on.”

“Our man will give it a try,” Laughton said, but he didn’t have much faith that it would yield anything. If the hard drive didn’t get burned out, these guys were too cagey to leave a trail of any kind. “And what was Jones’s first name again?” the chief said, circling back on the question in the hopes of shaking loose an answer.

“I don’t know,” McCardy said with the first twinge of annoyance.

“I find that a little hard to believe,” the chief said.

“Why? I didn’t deal with him. Carl never said.”

“You’re a sims hacker, but you have no idea how your product is sold, where the money comes from? Come on, Sam. You know that sounds ridiculous.”

“I’m a hacker. That’s all I know. Look around. I don’t even leave the house. And the one person I do see, you’re telling me is dead.” His face crumpled, and tears slid down each cheek, but he managed to avoid a full breakdown.

“We just want to find the person that killed your partner,” the chief said. “Given the business you’re in, it seems most likely to be related. Any names you could give us…”

McCardy opened his mouth, but closed it again, pressing his lips together in order to avoid losing control of his feelings. When the danger of crying had passed, he opened his mouth again, but the first words came out as a choke, and he had to swallow and repeat himself. “I really have nothing to do with the business side. Carl does all of that. This guy Jones moves it to a larger distributor who gets it off the preserve, I don’t know who. And then, I guess, I don’t know, metals?”

He really didn’t know. There were plenty of husbands who didn’t know what bills got paid because their wives took care of them. It must have been like that. “Okay,” Laughton said. There were only so many times the man could swallow his tears. If they pushed him too far, he’d be reluctant to come to them with more information later. “If you hear from Jones, though,” Laughton said, “let us know.”

McCardy had receded into his shell again. “Yeah. Of course.”

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Mathews said.

McCardy looked up at him. “Okay.”

Laughton passed by McCardy. “Let’s go,” he said, continuing out of the room. His junior officer followed behind, and they let themselves out the front door. It was so dark beyond the house’s aura, it was like they were on an island in space, disengaged from the rest of the world.

“A sister on the other side of the country and one name?” Mathews said, shutting off his body camera. “Half a name, really.”

The pain in Laughton’s face had returned, making it hard to see. “We’re done for the night,” he said, rubbing his head with both hands as he went to the truck. If only he could squeeze the pain away, out, gone. It made thinking impossible.

“Should I—?” Mathews started, as they got into the truck.

“I’m done,” Laughton snapped, collapsing into the passenger seat. He closed his eyes before Mathews even hit the power button, and focused on his breathing, trying to breathe away the pain, just breathe. He was asleep before they’d left town.