DiPietro finished his circuit of the studio with the bloodhound and came over to where Konstantin was waiting with Celestine. To her bemus.e.m.e.nt, it chose her foot to lie down on; barely half a second later, she was looking at a pop-up with the studio data profile. DiPietro looked at her questioningly.

"Yes, it's very efficient," Konstantin said, "but I think it begs the question of why anyone would feel the need to have a relationship with a program."

"Studies show--"

"So you told me. I'm just not that much of an animist." She turned to Celestine. "Now you can call Geekforce and have them dust the place. They can bitpick, you can supervise. There weren't going to be any exciting stolen car chases today anyway," she added as Celestine started to protest. She frowned down at the program, which was still lying on her foot and looking up at her in perfect bloodhound mournfulness. "I'm going to see if I can get an audience with the elusive Hastings Dervish."

"You know he probably won't see you," Celestine said.

"Oh, I know he won't," Konstantin said. "So he can just see someone else." She slid her foot out from under the dog. "Excuse me."

"Sure," said the dog, and put his head down on his paws.

In keeping with its exorbitant prices, You (Not You) had an access that remained invisible to all users below a certain credit rating, which made it moot for close to ninety-five percent of the people using AR at any time. Not that this stopped anyone from claiming to have seen it. Common wisdom held that anyone who claimed to probably hadn't, while anyone who had certainly wasn't going to tell you where to find it.

Konstantin had originally cla.s.sified it as another rest-stop along the PT Barnum Highway of Life, but that had been before the advent of characteristic identifier software. You (Not You) claimed to produce custom-made personas impervious to any identifier software of any type by ma.s.sive and exotic encryption of the wearer's output. You (Not You). "The name says it all," the sales representative had explained when Konstantin had first contacted them months earlier, suspecting some kind of fraud. She had had to send the prospectus they'd given her out to the Geekforce people with a careful note: Can they do what they claim, and are they doing it? The Geekforcers, whose dedicated concentration on data and only data put them on the level of a cloistered religious order had responded that most people could not afford any program sophisticated enough to break the encryption. Konstantin was pretty sure that this stipulation didn't apply to lowdown Hong Kong. On the other hand, she was willing to gamble that, with so many other suckers to fleece, Hong Kong mound might accept her persona at face value, especially if she did nothing out of the ordinary.

And if she could have figured out exactly what that might have entailed, it would have been a perfect plan. Still, even as an imperfect plan, it had merit.

She waited in the entry hall while Taliaferro contacted You (Not You) offline in an official capacity.

It wasn't long before he got back to her with the access code. "They're delighted to help us," he said, "attheir going rate."

"Ogada will kill me."

"Not if it works."

"I didn't say I was worried, I was just noting it for the record." She fed the access code into her address-finder.

A second later, she was standing on a skysc.r.a.per rooftop in a high wind that was almost authentic enough to make her want to blink. More rooftops, she thought. No wonder Taliaferro thought she was starting to feel at home. Or maybe AR was actually full of latent claustrophobes-- "Detective Konstantin?"

The voice behind her was not loud but it cut through the sound of the wind and other ambient noise without problem. Konstantin turned; the man who had spoken was wearing a sort of frock coat -- morning coat? What were those things called? He was exactly as tall as she was and had short, thick black hair of the sort that refused combing. Something about the shape of his face reminded her a lot of one of her uncles, though she couldn't have said which. Before she could answer him, he nodded and took a step to the left.

"This way."

He gestured at a single, isolated elevator car waiting with its door open, looking like an oddly misplaced closet or booth. It was all old polished bra.s.s and wood paneling, high-cla.s.s antique -- not a mere reproduction, but the real thing recreated bit by bit, byte by byte, actual size to pixel, resolution so complete that if you put your nose to the paneling, you could see the exact texture of the grain, and if you touched your finger to it, you would see your fingerprint in the shine.

"It's perfectly safe," he added.

"I was just admiring it," she said and stepped inside. He followed, pulling outer door closed and then the folding metal gate. Unable to help herself, she put her face as close to the wood paneling as she dared and saw she'd been right. The floor gave a small, genteel lurch to indicate they were ascending.

"This is perfect, isn't it?"

"It certainly is." The man carefully moved a black-handled lever and Konstantin felt the elevator accelerate a bit. "Hand-scanned and hand-corrected, built up in layers from wire frame with no dithering or fiddling. We are part of the World Within project."

Shouldn't that be we (not we)? she wanted to say, and somehow managed not to. "Very ambitious undertaking," she said after a moment. "Do you really think it's possible?"

"Don't you?"

"I don't know. I can't imagine trying to reproduce--"

"Recreate."

"--recreate, yes, sorry -- I can't imagine trying to recreate every human artifact still extant."

The man smiled. His eyes crinkled very slightly at the corners. "If you're thinking in terms of a group of college students armed with scanners and notebooks for extra credit, yes, that's impossible.

When you get, say, whole towns to agree to scan all of their favorite items for you -- including buildings, bridges, landmarks -- then it becomes something more conceivable."

"Except for the storage s.p.a.ce," Konstantin said good-naturedly. "I can't conceive of that much storage s.p.a.ce."

"Most people can't. Fortunately, we have machines to do it." He moved the handle again and the elevator came to a gradual stop. "We're here."

He pulled back the doors for her and she stepped out into a strangely bare room with grey carpeting, large windows curtained in translucent white, and two smallish but very overstuffed chairs facing a dais.

"Our showroom and fitting room," the man said, gesturing for her to sit in one of the chairs.

"Thank you," Konstantin said, feeling awkward. "Tell me, are you always so formal, or is it just because I'm the police?"

"We are always this formal," he said. "This is the way it's done. This is what people expect when they pay the kind of money we charge them. Bespoke items demand a certain kind of att.i.tude and ritual,whether it's a Hong Kong suit, or a Hong Kong persona."

Konstantin hoped her smile looked as formal as his. "I see my partner's briefed you."

"We need to know as much as possible in order to produce something that meets your needs. At the moment, your partner is transmitting any footage available along with a complete profile of your vitals and any other pertinent output data. We have to encrypt your vitals so that identifier software can't get onto you by way of a simple lie detector."

Konstantin gave the outfit points for lateral thinking. "Our own identifier software can work that way."

"Then we look at mannerisms, vocal tics, posture, and anything else that might register as a statistic." The man paused and looked at his watch. "Ah. They're done with your vitals."

"They're done collecting them?"

"No, they're done encrypting them. The Mannerism Workshop says you sigh a lot."

Konstantin considered that. "Figures."

"And you blink."

She blinked several times before the comment registered. "I do? Oh. Well, yeah, that, too. Is that going to be a problem?"

"Oh, no," the man said expansively, spreading both perfect hands. "They just like to make the client aware of what they have to work with."

"How many people do you have in this workshop?"

Now he looked satisfied. "Oh, no people, none at all. It's 100 percent AI staffed." He hesitated. "

I'm an AI, actually."

"Naturally," Konstantin agreed, covering her surprise, although she was hard put to say why she should have been surprised. The guy had been acting like an AI all along, so why should she have been surprised to find that it had been no act?

He consulted his watch again. "We'll have your persona coming up on the dais now momentarily--"

The light shimmered and a form began to coalesce under the lights. At first, Konstantin couldn't say a word. Then she turned to the AI man without bothering to disguise her anger. If he'd been a person, she might have hit him, or even tried to think of a reason to arrest him.

"You can send that abomination right back to the drawing board," she said, "and you can tell your one hundred percent AI-staffed workshop that--"

"I see I should have told them to warn you." Taliaferro's image insty-screened itself between their chairs.

Konstantin looked from him to the twelve-year-old girl on the dais and back again. "You're in on this?"

"I'm sorry, it was the best and most obvious solution."

"You're sorry?" Konstantin glanced at the AI man; he was staring into s.p.a.ce as if he were completely unaware of her or Taliaferro. She would have appreciated the courtesy if she hadn't been so angry. "I can't wear that, you know how I feel--"

"Which is why it's the best persona they can come up with. With the vitals encryption, the mannerism redirection, and your known dislike of child-masquers, it'll keep everybody off your track, including Goku Mura and the East/West gang. And their task force, whoever they are. I'm trying to track them down now, but it's pretty much an impossible job from out here." Taliaferro looked pained. "I know it's awful. I knew you'd hate it as soon as I saw the calculations and I should have told them to go a little slower with you instead of just throwing it in your face like that."

Konstantin was silent. After a while, she got up and went over to the dais.

The girl was an ethnic mix, predominantly Mongolian, the sort of thing that would not attract any attention in lowdown Hong Kong.

In the lowdown Hong Kong AR, Konstantin corrected herself. Looking at the child persona made her feel it was very important to remind herself by way of emphasis the fact that it was all happening in AR. So technically, ever so technically, it was all un-real. Or non-real, as she'd heardCelestine -- or was it DiPietro? -- say once. Other than real. Simulated. Be anyone, do anything. When anything can happen, nothing matters. Does it?

"Dore," Taliaferro said.

"I'm not talking to you," she said. "So, um--" she pointed at the AI man, who came alert and stood up, looking at her expectantly.

"So do I need any special help putting this on?" she asked him.

"You'll find it all very familiar to put on, but we do have a private area for you to use to get acclimated. You're going to have to get used to feeling like it's alternately sluggish and antic.i.p.ating you."

She nodded. "Show me what to do."

"If I could say something?" The AI man's expression was still the standard friendly, helpful concern, but the concern seemed a bit more predominant than before.

"All right," Konstantin said after a moment.

"This is not the first project of this kind that we've done here," he said. "Most clients have hated the results."

"What about those who didn't?" she asked. "Did they just not care?"

"Oh, no, they cared." The concern in the AI man's face deepened even more. "They fell in love."

Konstantin winced. "Disgusting."

"Dore," Taliaferro said again.

"I'm still not talking to you."

That it felt nothing like being a twelve-year-old girl was no consolation to Konstantin; she still felt like a pervert, and occasionally a parasite as well. The persona, who called herself the New Blue Rose of Chiba City for no reason Konstantin could discern, was an a.s.sa.s.sin, a popular occupation among lowdown children, but at least not a gang member, or a wh.o.r.e. She came supplied with a mythical record of pops (lowdown a.s.sa.s.sin-speak for kills) and a special cat that would have the casual observer believing she was a regular on the a.s.sa.s.sination circuit. Her specialties were blades, wires, and improvised weapons and she always worked close up because she liked the personal touch.

The good thing about functioning behind so many layers of encryption, Konstantin thought, was not having to worry about keeping a straight face. She wondered what her ex would have made of that, and then wished she hadn't. This had been the longest time she'd gone without sparing a thought for her ex; it was a shame to break a winning streak.

The AI man had been right about the persona feeling sluggish and intuitively antic.i.p.atory by turns.

The trick was keeping track of which areas had the greatest amounts of encryption and remember the slight variations in response times. It was more like trying to execute a tricky dance routine than merely wearing a disguise, even a disguise she hated. As she sidled through a wet, heavily littered back alley leading to one of the casino's service entrances, she wondered if Goku Mura felt anything similar when he was tricked out in his kid-face.

Or maybe he didn't need as much encryption as she did. Maybe he found it easy to fall into new patterns of movement and behavior, or at least different ones. Some people did, the AI man had told her; the workshop AIs at You (Not You) maintained a ma.s.sive catalog of behavioral decision-trees modeled on observation of volunteers and added to it regularly. Konstantin couldn't imagine who would volunteer for such a thing. Maybe all of them were like Goku Mura.

The most unsettling part of her new persona, however, was how small it made her feel -- not in character but from within the character. The kid-face felt like an oversized machine around her, even when she was perfectly in synch with it. It's a long way from here to the wall, she thought, taking what felt like giant steps up a concrete stairwell and listening to the tanky echo of her footsteps. Think ahead, and don't fall down.

But would it be so out of character if she did, she wondered suddenly, finding the staff entrance to the casino and standing on tiptoe to push her index finger against the entry b.u.t.ton and waited for the discreet click that would mean the door had unlocked for her. She was twelve -- not exactly the age ofcompletely reliable coordination. They'd made her a nailbiter, she saw -- not so bad that her fingertips had turned to misshapen bulbs but serious enough for her ridged nails to show no white, with lots of torn skin around the cuticles. The detail was painfully authentic -- the sort of thing the customers would pay and overpay for, in the name of something or other. Verisimilitude? Better-than-average kayfabe? Or just attention to detail. Whatever it is, customize it. Customize until your ears bleed.

Maybe hers were already bleeding so much she hadn't heard the door unlock. She tried the handle; when it didn't budge, she pressed the entry b.u.t.ton again.

"Hey, you. f.u.c.k-a.s.s lemongra.s.s."

Konstantin jumped and turned around. The hair had been shaved and the new stubble bleached white, but she recognized the nine-year-old boy. Did he know who she was? She searched the sullen face with its crude little tattoos over the eyebrows and on the bridge of the nose -- ideograms that were probably supposed to indicate what an incredibly dangerous little s.h.i.t he was -- but couldn't tell one way or another.

He shuffled a couple of steps closer and in spite of the fact that she was taller, she flattened against the door behind her. "Whaddaya mean, lookin' down at me like that, you know how f.u.c.k-a.s.s foul that is?"

"I can't help it," Konstantin said, annoyed but feeling as uneasy as she knew he wanted her to, which annoyed her even more. "You're short."

"Not me, big b.i.t.c.h, I'm normal. You're too f.u.c.k-a.s.s big. What're you gonna do about it?"

"What can I do about it? I'm--"

"Kneel down is what you can do about it. So get right down there, just like you're gonna pray."

He shuffled a tiny bit closer. "Come on, big b.i.t.c.h, you f.u.c.k-a.s.s deaf?"

Konstantin started to bend her knees and then suddenly leaned forward and shoved him as hard as she could with both hands.

"Hey--"

She caught a glimpse of him flying backwards toward the stairway leading down before she whirled, bashed the entry b.u.t.ton with a knuckle, and then yanked as hard as she could on the door. The click sounded like a rifle being c.o.c.ked and she staggered briefly before scrambling across the threshold and pulling the door shut behind her.

"f.u.c.k-a.s.s, I swear you die--!"

She held the door for a moment and then pelted down the hall to her left, swinging around a left turn and pelting along another hallway. This one was lined with open doors; private games, she saw as she went by, mah-jongg and dominoes, regular and mutant versions. The dominoes rooms were especially energetic, the tiles clacking and clattering as men in shirtsleeves threw them down with great force and announced something she couldn't understand -- their scores, maybe, or just a variant on the standard gamer war cry. Showrooms, for the discerning player looking for something a bit more sophisticated than mere jeweled tables and fiery opal lakes.

She skidded to a sudden stop in front of a doorway and hesitated, wondering if she should go in and hide. This room was a private card game with an unusual group of players -- one astoundingly beautiful woman in full Dragon Lady get-up, including cigarette in a holder, among a table of almost equally handsome young men who were in various states of undress. Before she could decide to keep running, one of the young men looked up from his cards and saw her.

The muscles in his dark brown arms made her think of large pythons crammed into a tight sack.

He had a roughly triangular face with a fighter's nose and very large almond-shaped eyes that tilted up at the outer corners. The eyes narrowed suspiciously as he lowered his cards to the table. He was bare-chested, his shirt draped over the back his chair. So he'd lost his shirt already, Konstantin thought, wanting to giggle at the silliness of it all. The Dragon Lady must have been pleased about that, as he had an impressive bodybuilder's physique, broad chest and wasp waist exaggerated just enough to be eye-catching without tipping over into absurdity -- a rare show of minor restraint in AR.

The rest of the players noticed him staring and turned to see what had captured his interest. The Dragon Lady raised her drawn-on eyebrows in perfect world-weary surprise and then turned back to thetable.

"All right," she said in a low, threatening voice, "who sent out for chicken?"