Goku Mura thought the old lady probably wouldn’t have fallen for it if the scammer hadn’t had the bright idea to use the term “Easter egg.” Emmy Eto, as she was known to her neighbors in the retirement community, was one of the last of the generation who had actually used the antiquated term. She was in her mid-nineties, which also made her old enough to remember Japan as it had existed physically, before quakes and tidal waves had reduced it to fragments that would have been uninhabitable even without the radiation. He didn’t want to think it made her more gullible.

He had no idea why Doré Konstantin had sent the case to him. For one thing, he hadn’t laid eyes on her in several calendar-months—more than two, fewer than six? Seven, for sure—which Konstantin said was a lot longer in AR time. Dog years, she called it. Although he had seen her in AR during that time, but only just barely—a flicker in the corner of his eye, too fast or too far away, but recognizable as Konstantin if only by the empty spot she left behind. Hello too busy talk later, he supposed, and marveled at how she managed to do it in Augmented Reality as well as Artificial Reality. The deregulation of Augmented Reality in the US had been a legal shit storm, leading to what Goku thought was the single most awe-inspiring piece of legislation of the last century: legal reality. He’d been dying to talk to Konstantin about it, but he’d been too busy even to send her a smart-ass remark.

Maybe that was why she’d sent him the Emmy Eto case, so he’d have to get in touch just to ask wtf. He read through it to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, but it seemed to be nothing more than what Konstantin called straight-up bunco—despicable but hardly a job for I3. The local law machinery could run it on autopilot: the prosecutor would claim two counts of special circumstances, saying Eto had been targeted not only because she was elderly and more vulnerable but also because she was Japanese. That made it a hate crime and therefore under federal jurisdiction. The prospect of facing a federal judge was usually enough to make offenders and their (usually) court-appointed lawyers amenable to a plea bargain, which was heavy on plea without much bargain. The DA simply removed the special circumstances charge. Relieved felons went off to serve sentences barely lighter than what they could have expected after a jury trial, thinking they’d been given a break, while overworked prosecutors were even more relieved to have saved themselves the trouble of working up special-circumstances briefs that were all too likely to be shit-canned by equally overworked federal judges with no room on their twenty-four-hour dockets.

The only thing slightly out of the ordinary about it was how the scammer was refusing to sit up and beg like someone who had seen the error of her ways, even just for the time it took a judge to gauge the sincerity of her remorse and pass sentence accordingly. She was a piece of work named Pretty Howitzer, not just legally but from birth. With parents like that, Goku Mura thought, she’d never stood a chance. Her record backed that up—a long list of unremarkable misdemeanors and felonies, suspended sentences, sentences commuted to time served, sentences reduced because there just wasn’t room in the correctional facility, along with a number of dismissals and DTPs. A Decline To Prosecute usually meant lack of evidence or witnesses or both, though one was also marked TFB, which, Goku discovered after a little digging, stood for Too Fucking Boring.

Too funny to ignore, he thought and phoned Konstantin.

He got one of her detectives instead, the one with the muttonchops. It took him a minute to remember her name: Celestine.

“Jurisdictional nightmare,” Celestine told him cheerfully. He’d never been a fan of facial hair on women or men, but something about her smile always gave him a lift.

“International?” He shrugged. “You guys handle international all the time.”

“In AR, sure. But this is also AR+.”

“What difference does that make?”

“It’s both Artificial Reality and Augmented Reality, with offline interludes, all crossing international borders. Our DA took one look and decided it was someone else’s headache. I gotta say, though, I didn’t think you’d be the lucky winner.”

“I didn’t know Konstantin was sending things out for the district attorney’s office these days.”

Celestine’s cheerful smile faded. “Uh, say again?”

“I got the case from Konstantin, not the DA.”

Now her face lost all expression. “Hang on.” She started paging through something on her desk just below camera range. It was almost half a clock-minute before she looked up again. “The DA’s office says it’s on record as exported to I3 twenty minutes ago. They’re also saying this must be a world record for turnaround.”

“I guess so,” Goku said, “because it got to my inbox twelve hours ago. You guys using neutrino mail?”

Celestine shifted uncomfortably. “Well, someone’s clock is off, maybe on this end. Somebody screwed up with the time zone or something.”

“I’ve never heard of that,” Goku said, “but as Konstantin always says, stranger things have happened.” The detective all but flinched at the mention of her name. He started to get a bad feeling. “Could be her joking around.”

“It’s not Konstantin,” Celestine insisted stonily. “And if it’s a joke—hell, I can’t think of anyone that tasteless even in the DA’s office.”

“Something happened.” Goku kept his voice even as a small, dense knot of dread formed in the pit of his stomach. Civil service: bureaucracy relieved by sudden incidents of homicide. Konstantin had laughed at that one till she cried.

“She got shot.”

Shot. Shit. Shooting the shit, she got shot. He forced the thought away. “How?”

“Sniper. Right in the eye.”

“Around the turn of the twenty-first century,” Lieutenant Bruce Ogada said as he and Goku sat in the empty waiting room, “someone had the bright idea to take a laser pointer and aim it at the night sky.” His dry, matter-of-fact tone reminded Goku of the last international economics report he had endured, minus the ambiguity. Ogada was dressed in a standard suit and tie. His one concession to his own comfort had been to remove his jacket and lay it over the arm of his chair; he hadn’t even loosened his tie, and his white shirt seemed as crisp and clean as if he had put it on only minutes earlier, fresh from the store. Fresh from the showroom, as Konstantin would have said had she been there, Goku thought, wishing she were with an intensity that under other circumstances he might have tried to tell himself was surprising.

He made himself sit up straighter in the peculiar chair. It was a weird piece of furniture, too large for one person and not big enough for two, making it impossible to rest both elbows at the same time without them being absurdly akimbo. The arms were thin, squared-off tubes of metal too uncomfortable to lean on anyway. It was a style of chair Goku had never seen anywhere except in waiting rooms, usually the kind that people didn’t want to be in—assuming there was any other kind. He was only in this one because he’d been turned away by the smiling gorgon at the entrance to Intensive Care. One visitor at a time, and even if her lieutenant hadn’t been visiting at the moment, his name wasn’t on the approved list. He’d have to see Lt. Ogada about that, if he cared to wait. He had, barely pausing to get a cap of the gorgon. The projection was completely opaque even as close as twelve inches, and its features had an authentic quality that suggested there was a real, possibly unwitting, model.

“A thin red beam of light going straight up into the dark, all tight and narrow and focused, must have been fascinating,” Ogada was saying. “ ‘Look at me, I’ve got a lightsaber a hundred miles tall.’ ” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands loosely folded. “One night during one of these do-it-yourself light shows—and I’m just guessing now but that’s how things like this usually happen—somebody noticed a plane flying in the vicinity and thought, what the hell. That’s what you do with a laser pointer—you point.”

Goku nodded, although Ogada wasn’t looking at him.

“When the beam hit the cockpit, it blinded the pilot. Temporarily, of course, although there were a few cases of burned retinas.” He looked over at Goku, eyebrows raised, a man about to reveal a critical detail. “Didn’t show up till a few days later. Pilot’d get a strange feeling in the eye, have a doctor check it out, and there it was.” He gave a short, soundless laugh. “A little round spot. Like a cigarette burn. Aiming a laser pointer at aircraft became a serious crime. Committed by morons, since it was easy to trace a laser beam back to its source.”

He let out a breath and sat back in his chair; it was similar to Goku’s but smaller, with padding on the arms. “The statute’s still on the books because, believe it or not, every so often, some idiot gets the brilliant idea to go outside and wave a laser pointer around. The aviator lenses most cockpit crews wear inflight usually protect their eyes so they don’t get burned, but sometimes, if a beam hits just right—excuse me, just wrong—it can actually fuck up the lens in a way that affects the pilot, or whoever. They get dizzy, disoriented, even have seizures.” His gaze had drifted away; now he looked at Goku again. “I don’t suppose any of this is news to you.”

Goku shrugged. “I’m not familiar with every country’s aviation laws.”

“You probably never leave home without your state-of-the-art safety goggles, just in case lenses aren’t enough. Or is that too low-tech for Interpol 3?”

Goku’s half smile was wry. “We have a small collection of old hardware, kind of an in-house museum—CB radios, break-glass fire alarms. Black lights. Modems. There’s even a Zippo lighter with a military insignia. I think it’s the US Marines Corps but I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just the army.”

Ogada’s face was expressionless, and Goku suddenly felt ashamed of his feeble attempt at humor. He was formulating an apology when Ogada spoke again.

“I know I3’s been trying to recruit her.” His face still gave no hint of emotion. “And before you ask, no, she didn’t say anything about it. She never mentioned you at all—I mean, not so much as a vague reference. As if she weren’t even aware of your existence. Which was how I knew. She didn’t want to give me an opening to ask any questions she didn’t want to answer. I know how she thinks.”

“She always said no.”

Now Ogada’s eyebrows went up again. “Did you ask her if she was thinking about it?”

Goku hesitated, unsure of what Ogada was getting at. “I had asked her to think about it.”

“But did you ask her if she was thinking about it?”

“Well …” Goku shook his head slightly. “She didn’t say she wouldn’t.”

“Yeah. That’s what she didn’t want to tell me, that she was thinking about it. She didn’t tell you that either. She just said no every time you tried to recruit her.” Ogada gave a short laugh. “I keep forgetting you’re not from around here.”

Goku smiled a little. “I was thinking the same thing about you,” he said, “until I remembered where I was.” Pause. “Look, I didn’t know anything about what happened till one of her detectives told me, the one with the—” he made a widening gesture on either side of his face with both hands.

“Celestine,” Ogada said.

“Right. And the only reason I called was to ask about a case. I thought I’d got one of hers by mistake.”

Ogada looked at him sharply. “Which one?” It sounded more like a demand than a question.

Goku gave him the gist.

“Oh, that one.” The lieutenant shook his head. “Jurisdictional nightmare. We voted it off the island. Something my father used to say,” he added in response to Goku’s puzzled look. “Case too small for you guys? Well, don’t worry—the minute Pretty Howitzer finds out I3’s interested, she’ll probably lie down and plead like she should’ve done in the first place.”

Goku decided against mentioning the contradictory information as to how it had come to him, at least for the moment. “Right now, I don’t give a shit one way or the other. I came to see how Konstantin’s doing.”

“No change from yesterday or the day before or any other day in the month since it happened,” Ogada said wearily. “I stop in two, three times a week, sit next to her, tell her I’m eating lunch, and suggest she lose some weight.”

“Why would you do that?” Goku asked, drawing back slightly.

“I figure that’ll get a rise out of her if nothing else will. So far—” He got up and put on his jacket. “No joy. We’ll get your name on the list, maybe you’ll have better luck. But not right now. You might as well come back to the precinct and question What’s-Her-Name Howitzer, she’s still in Holding. You guys got this case a lot faster than usual.”

“So I’ve heard,” Goku said.

Pretty Howitzer was a type that Goku privately classified as cute. He couldn’t decide how much Japanese there was in her lineage—more than a fourth, possibly more than a third, but certainly not more than half. The jailhouse lenses dulled her eyes a bit, but he could still see they were closer to gold than brown, and there was a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her turned-up nose. She was also very petite, more so than he had realized from her mug shots.

But the most striking thing about her at the moment was her relentless nail biting, which did nothing to undercut her blasé attitude. Someone had once told him that for some people, nail biting had nothing to do with anxiety—it was merely a neurological glitch, possibly a half-baked form of OCD or even Tourette’s. Pretty Howitzer made it look like self-indulgence; the longer she chewed on herself, the more relaxed she seemed, awkward as it was with the handcuffs.

Goku found it hard to watch, and there was nothing else in the small interrogation room to draw the eye. The observation window was camouflaged as bare wall, so there wasn’t even a mirror. Anyone with the slightest tendency to claustrophobia would have a rough time in this room. He remembered Konstantin’s partner, Taliaferro, who worked out of an office on the roof. Too long in here, Goku thought, and he might have to join him. Assuming Taliaferro was still getting away with it now that Konstantin was benched.

“So you’re the big bad I3 agent,” Pretty Howitzer said, removing her left index finger from her mouth briefly. “Thought you’d be taller. Or maybe it’s this room.” She dipped her head like she was afraid something would fall on it and looked from side to side. “Is it me or is this a goddamn shoebox?”

“It’s you,” Goku lied, mildly surprised at how confident he sounded. “Shit doesn’t get a whole lot deeper than this—well, not while you’re alive anyway. So if you feel like the walls are closing in, it’s because they are.”

Pretty Howitzer rolled her eyes. “If that’s a mixed metaphor, you’re not even trying.”

Several sharp retorts jockeyed for position in Goku’s mind, but what he heard himself say was, “Get your fingers out of your mouth.”

To his surprise, she obeyed. “Yeah, sure. Sorry.” The handcuffs rattled as she wiped her fingers on the front of her pink coverall. According to some expert, the color supposedly made prisoners feel physically and mentally less powerful. Pretty Howitzer looked like she was wearing a playsuit. “Most of the time, I don’t even know I’m doing it.”

“How do you cope in AR?” Goku asked. “Going without for hours must be real hard on you.”

“I don’t have to go without anything.” She looked down and to her left for a moment at something only she could see. Goku did likewise, but if her lenses were tapped, he wasn’t getting a copy. Civil service: he’d probably have to fill out eighty thousand forms in triplicate for a transcript. Which he could expect to receive in four to six weeks. “When they deregulated AR+, I sent a basket of flowers and a box of chocolates to my congresspeople,” Pretty Howitzer was saying. “And I can’t even vote.” Her upper body rose and fell with a deep sigh that was somehow both wistful and satisfied. “I don’t remember the last time I was stuck playing indoors.”

“Well, it’s the end of an era for you, Ms. Howitzer.” Goku leaned on the bare metal table between them and then was annoyed to find he had to pull his chair in farther. The legs shrieked on the floor, and he had to suppress the urge to pick the thing up and throw it across the room. “You don’t get AR or AR+ in prison. It’s just ground floor all day, every day, day in, day out. But the good news is, you can bite your nails whenever you feel like it. All the way down to your elbows, if you want.”

Pretty Howitzer wrinkled her cute little nose. “You talk like my grandfather. And that’s not a compliment. I hated that old f—”

“Get your fingers out of your mouth.”

She made a small, jerky movement, obeying reflexively before realizing she didn’t have her fingers in her mouth. “Hey!”

He grinned broadly without showing his teeth. “That why you’ve been picking on the old folks, because you hate your grandfather?”

“Oh, are you actually a head doctor? You gonna psychoanalyze me, figure out how I went bad? You want to put in some buttons, turn me good?” She wrinkled her nose again. “For. Get. It. Not giving up my free will, not for a hundred times what I took off that old bat. I’m pro choice all the way. I do whatever I choose to do, not because someone else controls me—”

“Get your fingers out of your mouth.”

Again, she started to obey before realizing she didn’t have to; he felt a surge of spiteful joy. “You fuckin’ cops,” she growled, infuriated. “Think you’re so genius—”

“I’m an Interpol 3 agent. I can show you my credentials,” he said, inflecting the last word carefully to trigger it.

She started to answer, then froze for half a second. Her eyes took on a brief faraway look before she closed them and moved her eyes from side to side a few times to dismiss the image he’d sent her. “If I want to see your fucking credentials, I’ll—oh, shit.” She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her thumbs against them.

Goku managed not to laugh. “That was your own fault. The way you said credentials.”

Again she stared distantly at nothing before she clapped her hands over her eyes. “Cut it out, asshole!” She knuckled her eye sockets.

“I’m sorry, that really was an accident,” he said, meaning it. “It’s a tone-of-voice trigger. If you can keep yourself from mocking me for at least two clock-minutes, it shouldn’t happen again. I don’t think. I don’t know what the system is here for jailhouse lenses.”

“Just proves my point.” Pretty Howitzer’s glare was slightly bloodshot. “Agent’s just a fancy name for cop and I3 agents are just free-range cops. You’re only interested in crimes in places you want to go so you can get a free paid vacation. Don’t give me that look. It’s true, everybody knows that about you agents.” Abruptly, she heard the way she’d said the last word and froze, looking dismayed. But agents wasn’t a trigger word. Today.

“I have to say, I’m gobsmacked.” He couldn’t help chuckling now. “That you would think I actually want to come here.”

“Gobsmacked?!” Pretty Howitzer threw back her head and hooted at the ceiling; the acoustic tiles swallowed her voice so quickly, she sounded almost staccato. The effect reminded Goku of a story he’d read long ago, about a man whose job involved cleaning leftover sounds out of empty rooms. Years later, he had started out in I3 doing something that he sometimes thought of as (vaguely, faintly) similar, just as a way to relieve (albeit very slightly) the stultifying tedium of surveillance.

“Do you ever hear yourself! ‘Oh, I say, old chap, I’m utterly gobsmacked by the whole bloody business.’ What’s that accent about anyway?”

“What accent?”

“Oh, veddy funny, old chap, veddy, pip pip cheerio and all that rot! Come on, what’s with you?”

Goku couldn’t help laughing. “Nothing. What’s with you, besides too much vintage TV?”

“Hey, I’m not puttin’ on an accent.”

“Neither am I. I was born and raised in England.”

“Yeah? You do all that English stuff ? Boarding school? Uniforms? Cricket, rum, sodomy, and the lash?”

Is this the vanguard of a new, more educated offender? he wondered, amused. “You’ll have lots of time to read about the lives of English schoolboys in the Mid-Atlantic Prison library.”

“What?!” Pretty Howitzer’s cute jaw dropped as she lost whatever cool she’d still had. “No! You can’t! I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t use a weapon, I didn’t even make threats! I’m a US citizen, you can’t sink me, you can’t!”

“I can. And the US apparently thinks it would be a good idea since they signed off on it.”

Her eyes moved rapidly as she searched for a pop-up that Goku knew wouldn’t be on her lenses. “Show me!”

“Paperwork’s still on the way,” Goku said smoothly, unsure if that were true. “Real paper. Sinking anyone, even a totally unapologetic and unrepentant career criminal like yourself, is serious business. Has to be done with hardcopy.”

“Who says I’m not apologetic?” Pretty Howitzer sat up straight and folded her cuffed hands on the table. “I said I was sorry! I always say I’m sorry! Look it up, it’s on the record!”

Goku leaned one elbow on the table and covered his mouth with his hand, as if he were thinking hard and not hiding a grin.

“Besides, I’m as much a victim here as Auntie Emmy,” she added, looking down her nose at him, or trying to. She came off more like an insolent child than a high-mileage felon, which Goku suspected was how she had managed to go as long as she had without doing any serious time.

He filed that for later consideration, along with Auntie Emmy. “What do you mean, you’re a victim? You knowingly sold a trusting old woman an invisible bag of vapor—”

“I didn’t knowingly do anything! It was supposed to be the real deal!”

Now he did laugh, a loud, hard, sarcastic sound that had little humor in it and was gone quickly, without even a hint of echo. The effect bothered the fuck out of him, Goku thought irritably. “There’s nobody—that’s capital No, capital Body—who would believe for one second—that’s capital One, capital Second—that you really, sincerely believed—”

“Okay, so you don’t believe me, but I swear, so help me freakin’ gods of techno—”

“—one hundred percent genuine—”

“—only because I knew it was the real thing—”

“—out door, egress, exit, whatever con artists are calling it these days—”

“I believed it because I tried it and it fucking worked!”

Goku stared at her for a long moment. Then he laughed again. “Whew, for a second there, the look on your face—you almost had me. Do you practice in front of a mirror or is it just plain old hardcore desperation? Don’t answer that,” he said as she opened her mouth. “I think maybe you need some alone time in a holding cell to give your situation some serious thought. But just to make sure you don’t get too bored, I’ll tell the duty officer to load some brochures for you.” He stood up, paying no attention to her protests. “About the programs and facilities available at Mid-Atlantic. Underwater correctional institutions are the most advanced and best equipped in the world. You get used to the emergency drill fast, I’ve heard. They’ve got education programs from the top schools, your Ivy League, Eton, Cambridge—and I mentioned the library, didn’t I?”

As soon he stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him, her pleading cut off as if someone had flipped a switch, and the ambient noise of the police station suddenly assailed him. A bit disconcerted, he leaned against the wall for a moment; funny, he thought, the way you never noticed how much things echoed under ordinary conditions. Not to mention how much difference there was between quiet and the absence of sound.

The flicker at the left-hand edge of his vision came just as he thought of Konstantin, two separate things happening simultaneously. His initial reaction was reflexive now, a mental smile coupled with mild embarrassment for still not having reciprocated. It took a full clock-second for him to remember that according to what both Celestine and Ogada had told him, nobody had received any messages of any kind from Konstantin for at least four weeks; nobody could. Therefore, nobody had.

The flicker sure seemed like her, though. Even considered in the context of what he knew, there was a Konstantin-ness about it that he told himself to chalk up to wishful thinking. People saw what they wanted to see and more often than not the mind was only too happy to dance along. It didn’t take much fancy footwork to make music out of a stray fragment of noise.

And anyone who didn’t believe that could check out the millions of people who had been sold all those magic beans: beachfront in Kansas, the true Hope Diamond, a deposed king’s hidden gold, the blessing of never-ending good luck, the Deity’s unlisted phone number. Or the absolutely-positively-not-fake-not-a-simulation-but-real conversion code for the Out Door, derived by a scientist using the secrets of the Pharaohs and the Mayans, giving you unlimited access to everything you wanted and more—contact your more successful self in another timeline and see where you went right, ascend to a higher plane of being, join God’s private club! Or just go to Japan.

“To be honest, I felt sorry for her.”

The small round object in the bottom of Goku’s cup opened out into a blossom under the stream of boiling water from the spout of Emmy Eto’s fancy electric kettle. It amused him that most Americans referred to it as a teapot, even though they only heated water in it.

“That was why I gave her a freebie in the first place,” she added, pouring water into her own cup before replacing the kettle in its stand on the coffee table and sitting down on the couch beside him.

“A freebie?”

Emmy Eto chuckled. “On the house, gratis. You don’t have to pay.”

“Yes, I know. I’m just not sure what you mean by you gave her a freebie.”

“That’s a delightful accent. London, am I right?” Emmy Eto chuckled again, eyes twinkling in a way that made him think of Celestine’s smile, although there was no resemblance between the two women. Emmy Eto was ninety-five, with short, silvery hair carefully styled to look unruly and bright green contact lenses. Goku suspected her eyes would have been just as bright without them; no doubt she could be quite unruly too.

“Please, Ms. Eto,” he said, taking a sip of tea. The flower waved at him from the bottom of the cup.

“You’ll want to spoon that out,” she told him. “Unless you’re a typical Brit and like your tea thoroughly stewed.”

The flower went from graceful to drowned as he removed it to a saucer on the table. “Please, Ms. Eto?” he said again.

“I’m a professional relative,” she said. “Isn’t it in the case file?”

Goku felt his face grow warm. “I’m sorry, I obviously missed that.”

“Because you figured I’m just retired. Oh, don’t have a cow, dude,” she added, waving one hand as he started to apologize. “You want to know the truth, I’d have figured that too if I were in your place. Most of the people who live here are at leisure, shall we say. They’ve had two, three, even four careers—and that’s not counting all the McJobs for rent money in between. And they’ve had about as many families, formal and informal. Worked their asses off—well, their hips, knees, and shoulders anyway. There’s so much titanium around here we get more spam from salvage firms than funeral homes.

“Anyway, most of my neighbors are tired. They just want to hang out, spark a few bowls of medicinal, and watch a movie. With or without actually putting one on.”

Goku sipped some more tea, even though it was too hot, to keep himself from grinning.

“And I gotta admit, I do that too now and again. Careers and McJobs—I had ’em back to back. I traveled a lot, lived in a lot of different places. But I only ever had one family. One husband, one child, and I had the bad grace to outlive both of them.”

Goku blinked away the definition of McJobs that had popped up in the lower left-hand quadrant of his vision and said, “I’m sorry.”

“It was a very long time ago,” she said, waving away his words again. “You don’t set out to be a widow, but you live with the possibility and what happens is what happens. But surviving your child is an unnatural act, especially when she’s an actual child. Takes a long time to make up for it. So I rent myself out to people who need a nice old lady relative. Grandma for the kids, auntie for the grown-ups. Sometimes both at once, in which case I give them a special rate rather than just double-dipping. Anyone who has to hire a nice old lady relative in the first place deserves a break. And you’d be surprised at how many people that is.”

She picked up a small remote and pointed it at a large painting of wild horses running through a countryside under a stormy sky on the wall opposite. The image faded away to a white background, where color photos of various shapes and sizes began to appear. The people in them were various shapes, sizes, and colors as well. Many of the pictures had been taken at special occasions—birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, graduations, and holidays, big elaborate parties and smaller, more intimate get-togethers. But there were also plenty of Emmy Eto sitting with a toddler on her lap or walking in a park holding hands with a couple of small children. And a few not-so-small children.

He was grinning from ear to ear, Goku realized, and tried to tone it down without sobering too abruptly. “That’s quite a lot of people,” he said, “but if we could get back to—”

Nodding, she used the remote again. “You’re just lucky I didn’t cue up the soundtrack.” She chuckled. “You’d have sat through the whole six hours, weeping nonstop. Big, manly, silent tears, of course.” She put a hand to her lips. “Oh, no, wait, I forgot, it’s all stiff upper lip with you Brits.”

The words were out of his mouth before he’d even known he was going to speak. “But I’m also Japanese. Like you.”

“And?” Emmy Eto blinked at him. “Meaning what?”

“I was just thinking that you’re old enough remember Japan, the actual land, before the quakes—”

“Yes, we both existed at the same time, but I never went there.” She sighed heavily. “I’m as much a sansei as you are in that respect. What does that have to do with Pretty Howitzer?”

“It’s part of the special circumstances attached to the charges against her. She targeted you not only because you’re elderly but also because you’re Japanese.”

Emmy Eto sighed. “We’ve been vaccinating against plaque and vascular dementia and schizophrenia and all kinds of other head bugs for, what, seven decades? Almost eight? And everyone still thinks that if you’re over eighty, you got nothing above the neck but moths and cobwebs.”

“I don’t feel that way,” Goku said, hoping he sounded kind rather than defensive. “And neither does anyone I know at I3 or—”

Emmy Eto shooed his words away with both hands. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s always some other, much less enlightened dude.” Abruptly, she grimaced. “Oh, hell. I’m sorry, Agent Mura, I’m taking things out on you and I shouldn’t. I just get so fucking cheesed off sometimes. You have no idea, the crap aimed at people my age. Nostalgia and religion, religion and nostalgia, like no older person is interested in anything else. Well, I’m all about today, right here, right now, and then what’s on for tomorrow. You know what I did yesterday? Went to the farmer’s market and bought green bananas. That’s right, you heard me, I’m ninety and I bought green bananas—in your face, mortality! Woke up this morning—in your face again, mortality! Just because I’m not concerned about getting pregnant—or not getting pregnant—and what the hell is it with all that pregnancy hoo-ha anyway? Pregnancy isn’t the permanent centerpiece of every woman’s life, even if they’re actually pregnant! It’s ageist, it’s sexist—” Putting a hand to her mouth, she looked down at her lap, smiling with embarrassment.

“Damn, I’m so sorry,” she said, laughing a little. “Once I get started, I can’t seem to stop, and it’s so rude. Please forgive me again, Agent Mura.”

He waited for her to look up, but apparently he’d have to forgive her first. “There’s no need to apologize, Ms. Eto. When you’re the victim of a crime, it’s quite normal to feel like the whole world is against you.”

Now she did look up, her face a mixture of surprise and relief. “Oh?”

He nodded. “It’s bad enough dealing with the complications, anything from overdue bills to repo men. Or losing something that means the world to you but has no monetary value to the shithead who took it and probably threw it away.” Emmy Eto gave a surprised giggle at the profanity. “But then there’s the indignity of how people keep referring to you as the victim rather than using your name. It adds insult to injury.”

Emmy Eto put both hands over her face for a long moment. Goku thought she was crying and looked around for some tissues, but when she lowered them, her face was dry and composed. “I thought I was being childish.”

“Were you not offered counseling?” Goku asked, making a mental note to ask Celestine.

She made another shooing motion with both hands. “Bitch, puh-leeze.” Her cheeks suddenly turned pink. “As we used to say in my day, if you’ll pardon my Hungarian. That little bitch Pretty Howitzer, she needs therapy. I need my money back.” Pause. “Or am I just shit outta luck on that one?”

Goku made another mental note to follow up on counseling for her anyway. “No, these days we can trace where the money went,” he told her. “But that takes time. And it takes more time to convert it back to liquid form.”

Emmy Eto’s hopeful smiled faded. “Convert it from what?”

“People like Pretty Howitzer love to buy themselves presents, goods or services. Property is usually straightforward, services are trickier.”

“Which means I can’t count on getting all my money back.”

“No, but you’ll get most of it. I3’s recovery team seldom recoup less than seventy-five percent of the original monetary value, and it’s usually closer to ninety percent.”

This information didn’t cheer her as much as he’d hoped. “And how much time are we talking about?” she asked.

“Well … longer than anyone would like.” He hesitated, then plunged ahead before he could think better of it. “May I ask you a personal question, Ms—ah, Auntie Emmy?”

“You can ask.” Suddenly a little of the old twinkle was back in those unequivocally green eyes.

“Is this the first time you’ve been the v—ah, on the receiving end of a criminal act?”

“Nice save.” She twinkled some more. He started to wonder if it was a special effect in her lenses. “And to answer your question, no, but it’s been a very, very long time since my last brush with the underworld. All I usually have to worry about are drive-bys and snipers. No matter how much ’proofing you’ve got, something always gets through.”

Goku frowned. “But this is a residential building.”

“But not a completely residential area. Lots of stores means lots of shopping and lots of shopping means lots of advertising—active advertising that lots of people engage with. There’s enough activity to reveal the local market segments. It’s almost spam but not quite.” Emmy Eto shrugged. “My filters update every other day. Whatever gets through, I trash without really seeing it.”

“Any ill effects—headaches, mood swings, increase in episodes of déjà-vu?”

Emmy Eto shook her head. “Get to be my age, you’re inured to a lot. It takes more to make an impression than when you’re thirty. Or even sixty.” She laughed suddenly. “Listen to me. What was I saying about ageism?”

Goku chuckled. “It’s not ageism to understand your own characteristics, is it?”

“I dunno, dude. Maybe. Stranger things have happened.”

The words echoed in his head, but in Konstantin’s voice. Stranger things have happened. If I had a family crest, that would be on it. Stranger things have happened—they’ll carve it on my tombstone.

Emmy Eto was staring at him. “Is something wrong, Agent Mura?”

“My calendar’s just reminding me of an appointment.” He stared off to one side for a moment, hoping he looked like he’d just had a pop-up from his to-do list, then pretended to blink it away. “Now, where were we?”

“In the middle of your very busy day,” Emmy Eto said. “Sorry, I know I’m just one of a gazillion cases. Tell me what else you want to know, I’ll try not to ramble. More tea?” Without waiting for an answer, she took his cup into the tiny kitchenette, rinsed it out and brought it back with a fresh blossom in the bottom.

“You mentioned feeling sorry for Howitzer,” Goku prompted as she flipped the kettle’s on switch. “In what way?”

Emmy Eto laughed. “That name, for one thing. What kind of person could look at their newborn baby and think, Pretty Howitzer? Either her parents hated her or had a cruel sense of humor, or both.”

“You never thought it was a made-up name?”

“Sure, at first. But it isn’t.”

“You’re pretty—ah, very certain. What ID did she show you?”

Emmy Eto chuckled. “A card of origin, but even I know those can be stolen or forged. What convinced me was—” She took a pair of oversized sunglasses out of a case lying on the coffee table and put them on. “Goku Mura?”

Then she hooked a finger over the frames, pulling them down her nose to stare at him over the tops of the lenses. He kept his expression neutral.

“Well, that’s a surprise,” she said, her gaze even sharper than her tone. “I had no idea Interpol 3 allowed an agent to work under an assumed name.”

“More like a nom de plume, actually,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound sheepish. “Or nom de guerre might be more like it. For the protection of family members as well as ourselves. It keeps the professional completely separate from the personal. Tell me, how did you come by that particular bit of software?”

She folded the sunglasses and put them back on the table, well out of his reach. “Oh, I know a dude who knows a dude who knows a dude. It’s not one hundred percent accurate. If you’d been on your guard, I wouldn’t have caught you. And in answer to your question—” Suddenly her face was sad. “My daughter cooked it up. She was very bright, my girl, a prodigy. Eccentric—she straddled the border between Asperger’s and autism. She was fascinated by the physical characteristics of human emotion. She created the program to measure the response when you called someone by name. Well, by a name. You know there are people in this world who believe on a gut level that their name is Lover or Darling. Or—” She gave a short, soundless laugh. “—I’m sorry to say, Asshole. Fortunately, there aren’t many of those.” She laughed again, more heartily. “Well, actually, there are plenty of those, but only a teeny-tiny minority would answer to the name, at least in here.” She put one hand to her chest and covered the glasses possessively with the other. “You aren’t going to confiscate them, are you?”

“Not unless you’ve used them to commit a crime,” he said, shifting uneasily on the couch. “Not invading people’s privacy, are you? Stealing their life savings?”

Emmy Eto smiled demurely. “I’ve been a good girl, Agent Mura.”

“I’m sure. Now, about your relationship with Pretty Howitzer—”

“Believe it or not, I’m not a total mark, Agent Mura.” The sadness returned to Emmy Eto’s face. “Like I said, I only talked to her in the first place because I felt sorry for her. I could see she was lonely.” A corner of her mouth twitched in a brief half smile. “But I suppose being a con artist is a lonely way to make a living. Anyway, I always enjoyed a good Easter Egg and I really thought it was all she had. I’d have overpaid for it—not as much as she ended up getting out of me but still, too much. Just because I thought it would make her happy and I can’t take it with me.”

“Then she disappeared and reappeared?” Goku prompted. This was usually the trick that scammers like Pretty Howitzer used to seal the deal.

But Emmy Eto shook her head. “Oh, please. I know how camouflage and encryption works in Augmented Reality, how it’s just the surroundings prerecorded and interpolated. Even the cheapest AR+ cover-ups work fine as long as whoever or whatever you’re covering doesn’t make any sudden moves. Or if you don’t, because you’ll get that lag with the perspective.

“Personally, I don’t bother with anything cheap—my mother always said cheap was dear in the long run—but some people aren’t fussy. They don’t care if the perspective doesn’t shift perfectly or the resolution gets a little chunky. One lady I know says she likes it that way. She says it reminds her that there’s less than meets the eye. But I say if you’re going to use AR+, then use it. Go big or go home. That’s another of my mother’s sayings.”

She stared silently down at the cup in her hands before she set it on the coffee table. “The disappearing act was pretty good. She even managed to fix the log so it looked like there was missing time. Maybe that might have convinced me, I don’t know.”

“If that didn’t,” Goku asked gently, “what did?”

“I saw my girl.” Emmy Eto gazed at him for a long moment as if expecting some reaction. “I saw my girl and I called her by name and it was her. I didn’t have the software from those sunglasses, of course, but I’d seen her through them often enough that I could tell. She knew her name. And she knew me.”

He nodded. “I see.”

“And I certainly did. That’s how they get us, isn’t it? Not by what they show us but by what they can get us to see. Because we see what we want to see. You’d think we’d live and learn, but we never do. I remember hearing all about the Virtual Homeland scams. People fooled into believing they could actually inhabit a whole new world or a whole new universe. Or an old one, lost to earthquakes and radiation. I never understood how people could fall for that. Not until there was something I wanted to see.”

His conscience pounced on him the moment he left Emmy Eto’s apartment building (the brushed metal plaque over the main entrance declared it was a retirement community in emphatically no-nonsense letters). No surprise—as soon as he’d known he wasn’t going to confiscate Emmy Eto’s sunglasses, he’d felt it getting ready. Simply tagging the glasses for collection after Emmy Eto’s eventual death wasn’t enough to satisfy what Konstantin called his inner Boy Scout.

I could go back inside and see if Auntie Emmy would be open to sparking a bowl of medicinal. Just as a favor to a stressed-out free-range cop. They only use top-grade stuff for medicinal—

Some part of him—a surprisingly big part—thought that was the best idea he’d had all day. But he knew that if he did go back to Emmy Eto’s apartment, it wouldn’t be to get high but to take her dodgy sunglasses, the way he should have if he’d been going by the book. He’d be very apologetic and explain that while the software was not exactly against the law, it was in a gray area that almost always resulted in expensive legal problems for the average citizen, who of course didn’t mean any harm, but still. She would argue that lots of people had lenses with add-ons that were just as sketchy, not to mention stuff that actually was illegal, and he’d tell her, yes, that was true, but he didn’t know about anyone else, only her. She had used the software not just in his presence but as part of their interaction, while he was on duty and without his consent. And then—

And then nothing. He was spinning his wheels imagining a conversation he’d decided not to have. He cleared his mind and focused his attention on his surroundings—the line of flowering shrubs that went the length—width?—of the building on either side, the recently repaved sidewalk parallel to it, the convenience shop—no, they called it a store here—on the corner. Diagonally opposite was another convenience store from a competing chain. The two stores seemed to be having a price war, but he wasn’t sure on what; maybe everything. The four-lane traffic-way that ran past the building was restricted to local and electric, except for emergency vehicles. It was so empty he wondered if it had been closed off for some reason before five two-seaters appeared several blocks in the distance. Scan-vees, he saw as they approached, from the World Within project. He turned his back as they passed him, although he didn’t actually care. He had walked through so many World Within scans, his mannequin was probably one of their standard placeholders. Facial features scrambled so he was unrecognizable, of course.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps someone who knew him well enough would recognize him anyway. Emmy Eto’s semilegal sunglasses.

He was waiting to cross the street in front of the convenience store when he finally noticed a message light in the lower left-hand corner of his vision blinking. It was a short note from Ogada, saying he might as well use Konstantin’s office while he was here.

The offer took him by surprise. It hadn’t even occurred to him to ask because he hadn’t thought about staying any longer than it would take to arrange Pretty Howitzer’s transfer to London. He hadn’t given any thought to that either, but it didn’t really require any—all he’d have to do was fill out a form, then go home and wait for a couple of prisoner transport marshals to arrive with her a day or two later.

He didn’t have to be in such a hurry. Ogada had thought being handed over to I3 would make Pretty Howitzer more cooperative, though she had been more rattled by the prospect of hard time underwater. If he gave her more time to think about it, let her sleep on it, she might be only too happy to work out a deal with the local authorities. In which case, he could sign it back to Ogada or Celestine or whoever had caught it to begin with and save I3 the expense of airfare plus accommodations for two prisoner transport marshals. No, he definitely didn’t have to be in such a hurry.

Something moved in his peripheral vision and he automatically focused on it, thinking it was another message. But there was no blinking light. The movement came again, something moving just out of his visual range. He turned his head. Across the street, two people were coming out of a café and holding the door for two other people going in. Again, motion fluttered on the far side of his vision. This time, he relaxed his focus and let himself see rather than actively looking.

It was the barest flicker, over almost before it registered on him. There had been an image of some kind, he was sure of it, but the only thing that came to him was Konstantin’s face.

Emmy Eto’s own security system was usefully elaborate, more so than he had expected. Combined with surveillance from the building as well as standard public records, Goku had nearly minute-by-minute accounting for Pretty Howitzer and Emmy Eto together, and not much less separately, but only for the period leading up to the crime. The actual crime itself was documented in and out of AR+ by the bank records showing the transfer of money from Emmy Eto to Pretty Howitzer.

Studying the transaction, Goku wondered if Emmy Eto knew how lucky she was that she had done everything in Augmented Reality. Had the scam occurred in Artificial Reality, it would have been harder to make a case against Pretty Howitzer. Not impossible—there had been a number of successful prosecutions against people who had scammed the elderly, all predicated on the claim that the offenders had deliberately used techniques and FX to confuse and disorient their aged victims to the point where they became incapable of distinguishing between AR and an unenhanced, nonaugmented offline environment. A few less-than-elderly people had tried using the same argument for civil actions against scammers who had relieved them of money or property or both while in AR. Results had been mixed, especially across international boundaries, and even successful plaintiffs learned that the difference between winning a judgment and actually collecting was a lot like the difference between AR and unenhanced, nonaugmented offline reality.

He didn’t think anyone would believe Emmy Eto had been confused and disoriented by Pretty Howitzer. The old lady wore several layers of AR+ routinely and nonstop during her waking hours—in a typical day, she probably didn’t see the unenhanced, nonaugmented offline world for as long as sixty seconds. If that—he revised the estimate downward when he saw how often she slept with her lenses in. She did a lot of swapping too, as well as layering. Between her assorted glasses and contact lenses, she probably changed the world half a dozen times before lunch. After which she probably napped for an hour, waking to butterflies and honeybees.

She would never come off as someone who could be confused or disoriented to a jury. He wouldn’t have believed it himself. And yet, when he had asked her if she really thought Pretty Howitzer had an out door—an actual, no-fooling portal to a different reality—she had said yes.

“Of course, I don’t believe it now, Agent Mura, and if you’re anything like me, you probably don’t understand how I ever could have. Do you think I’m wondering how I could have been so gullible? Well, I’m not. I know why I fell for it. I saw because I was looking for it, and it was as real as anything else I see with my very own eyes.” She had looked around, moving only her eyes, a tiny smile on her lips. “And if I saw it again tomorrow, it would be déjà vu all over again.”

The recording stopped and Emmy Eto vanished. Goku found himself sitting sideways at his desk, the way he would have been had he still been sitting next to her on her couch. There was a slight crick in his side from the awkward posture he had unconsciously assumed to keep his elbow from touching the arm of his chair; it would have ruined the illusion.

And there it was, practically on cue: a faint flutter at the limit of his peripheral vision, but this time on the left rather than the right. He made a note to find out if Emmy Eto had noticed her daughter’s image on one side more often than another or whether it just popped up in the middle.

His phone chimed with a message from Ogada, telling him he could visit Konstantin this evening.

At first Goku thought he was in the wrong room. There was a wire-frame contraption rather than a bed, and the figure suspended in it looked more like a large doll than a living person, a sexless, featureless mannequin in an elaborate hotsuit meant for a programming engineer or a Foley editor rather the standard end-user. Then he realized and looked away.

“It’s always so hard when people see someone they know in a condition like this.” The nurse’s low, kindly voice had a hint of the Caribbean. Goku wondered how far removed she was from it, whether she ever went there, and if so, did they welcome her home or as a tourist.

“I didn’t think there were many people in this condition,” he said, still not looking at Konstantin.

“I meant a condition like this—incapacitated. If I gave offense, I apologize.”

“You didn’t, not at all.” Goku winced inwardly. “One of her staff told me about the, ah, incident and that it was an unusual injury. She had a hard time explaining. I ran into her boss and I thought maybe he could tell me more. But all I got from him was something about laser pointers and burned retinas.”

The nurse raised her eyebrows. “Hmph. Pretty good.”

Pretty Good—Pretty Howitzer’s overachieving cousin, the one she could never live up to; the thought blew through his mind, a scrap of absurdity. Konstantin had talked about sometimes feeling a sense of unreality or surreality. He’d never been quite sure what she meant, but now he thought he had an inkling.

“Too simple, of course,” the nurse went on. “If it really were that basic, they might have made some progress with her. But as an analogy, it’s pretty good. Better, though, for the neuros to accept that a person is more than a mind driving a body.”

“Greater than the sum of her parts?” He suppressed the urge to mutter something sarcastic about platitudes.

She made a disgusted noise. “Oh, don’t give me that.”

“Excuse me?” Goku stared at her.

“People who say that think they know all the parts. What they are, how many.”

He shook his head, baffled.

“People are a lot more complex. Can you trace the exact shape of the hole she left when she fell out of her life?” The nurse looked at him with grim amusement. “Work on that, maybe you’ll be getting somewhere.” She went over to the framework holding Konstantin and peeled back the right sleeve of the suit, exposing a pasty but still firm-looking forearm. She bared Konstantin’s hand as well and Goku started to turn toward the door, thinking the nurse was going to bathe her.

“No need to go,” the woman said. “You came to visit, stick around.” She laid her own arm along Konstantin’s, intertwining their fingers, and gently moved Konstantin’s hand back and forth as if trying to retrain her movements. Next to the nurse’s dark brown skin, Konstantin’s looked as white as paper, but it wasn’t the contrast that struck him.

After a couple of minutes, the nurse switched the position of her arm so that it was now on the outside of Konstantin’s. It didn’t look like any physical therapy he had ever seen, but he resisted the temptation to say as much. Instead, he asked, “Does that help?”

The nurse smiled. “Can’t hurt.”

“Do you ever try that with both her arms at once?”

“Takes two people. If you’re volunteering—” she tilted her head toward Konstantin’s other arm.

“Actually, I was thinking five more people at least. There’s a form of Japanese theatre called bunraku—”

“I know what bunraku is. Those big puppets. It’s not a bad idea,” she said, still manipulating Konstantin’s arm. “But now it’s getting complicated.”

“So? You just said people are complex.”

“I mean legally—permissions. Which would be all right, but … ” She gave him a Look. “The lieutenant told me you were in from England. You want to help with this, you can’t phone it in. We don’t do AR or AR+. You planning to stick around?”

He nodded and immediately there was another flicker on the left. Definitely right on cue, too perfectly timed to be more than that fancy footwork all human brains were so partial to, even his. In this case, especially his.

But what the hell, he thought. He didn’t have to believe one way or the other. In which case, he would stipulate for the record—whatever record that was—that yes, he wanted to see Konstantin. And he would come here and see her tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, for as many days as he could wheedle out of I3.

If he saw her every day, the odds were good that sooner or later she might catch a glimpse of him.