"So, are you ready to have your brain washed, dried, and martinized?" Darwin asked her.

"Snap out of it," Konstantin told him. "We aren't even handcuffed. This wouldn't even raise a blip on a bondage meter, let alone false arrest--"

"Yeah?" Darwin sat back and folded his arms. "Try to get up."

Konstantin obeyed and discovered that someone had super-glued her b.u.t.t to the bench. "OK,"

she said, "now we're getting somewhere." She moved her eyes in the requisite pattern and the exit pop-up appeared on the right side of her visual field. "The exit pop-up's working."

"You mean, you can see it," Darwin said ominously. "Just try to use it."

She felt an uneasy chill as she blinked at the pop-up. It was followed by annoyance as she found herself standing in the first stage exit lobby amid the usual mult.i.tude of regular users entering or leaving AR.

"You really looking for the exit?" said a smooth voice close to her ear. "Or is what you really want the way out?"

Konstantin winced, drawing away from the voice. A disembodied mouth, several times larger than life-size smiled oozily at her with exaggerated, lush lips. She made a gun out of her left hand and aimed at the mouth; it dodged the bright blue lightning bolt that leaped from her fingertip and blew her a string of heart-shaped bubble kisses. "Missed me, missed me, now you'll have to kiss me," it jeered. She fired again and, to her surprise, hit it this time, just at the extreme left-hand corner. The mouth zoomed away with a sound like a scalded weasel.

Stupid spam, she thought poisonously, and blinked her filter on so she would be invisible to any others, for the rest of this session, at least. They were getting better at slipping through the filters, masquerading as personal or business communications or even legitimate sponsor ads. Annoying but not yet illegal. She looked around for Darwin, but no solid image of the cyborg appeared among the mult.i.tude of semi-ghosts moving around her. She whistled for him, first on the police-witness frequency and, when there was no answer, she started on the ten private ones he'd given her.

A message came back via pop-up on the seventh. Callee is currently unable to answer your whistle personally and left the following message for you: "You may never see the REAL me again."

That a.s.sumes I saw the real you to begin with, Konstantin thought, amused. Highly doubt that I did. Nonetheless, she zapped him a get-out-free pa.s.s and waited to see if he'd use it to join her, not really expecting him to. She'd written him off as a crank (likely) or a disgruntled gambler (far more probable) who'd lost all his stuff in a game he'd known all along was crooked, and was trying to swindle it back again. Konstantin had a filter for those, too, but a canny few always managed to bob and weave enough to get through to her. Most of them needed therapy than anything else and, for the thousandth time, she thanked the random forces in the universe that she was not a therapist.

Her pop-up gave her a polite reminder of how long she'd been in and suggested she withdrawsoon to avoid a headache or, in extreme cases, a seizure. Supremely annoyed now, Konstantin grabbed the pop-up and whited out the seizure bit. The commissioner's scare tactics bothered her a h.e.l.l of a lot more than anything AR hot dogs like Darwin might do.

"You have defaced official law enforcement equipment," said a business-like contralto.

"Really? My hand slipped." Konstantin was about to request departure when, through the speedy blur of the semi-ghosts transiting to and fro, she saw someone perfectly recognizable approaching her, which meant he had requested her frequency. It took her a moment to place him.

"Well, you look different on eye level than you do ten-twelve feet in the air playing blackjack," she said.

The man was j.a.panese-Occidental and very, very annoyed. "What the h.e.l.l did you think you were doing back there?"

"Back where?" she asked.

He shifted position, slipping one hand into his jacket pocket and coming out with a silver case. He clicked it open one-handed, selected a pure white cigarette without offering her one, and put the case away. The cigarette lit itself; he drew on it and blew a stream of smoke over her head.

"Impressive," said Konstantin, meaning it. "Where'd you get it?"

He didn't answer. On impulse, Konstantin grabbed his face, pushing his cheeks together to purse his lips. He batted her arm away angrily and took a step back.

"That's not an animation," Konstantin said admiringly. "That's a real simulation. That is really, really good. It really is. Really."

"You didn't answer my question," he snapped. "What the h.e.l.l did you think you were doing back there?"

"Well, who the h.e.l.l wants to know?" Konstantin asked pleasantly.

"You intruded into an investigation of practices in the lower Hong Kong mound."

Konstantin crossed her arms. "Excuse me if I interrupted the rhythm of your investigation. Sure it isn't more like a master's thesis or a news-p.o.r.n feature story?"

"You f.u.c.kin' American."

"Pardon?"

"Yeah, I thought so. It just figures. Only a f.u.c.kin' American goes stomping into any place, any time, anywhere, without a second thought as to who else might be at work." He blew another stream of smoke over her head. "I've been stationed in that casino for two Hong Kong months, gathering evidence as part of a major police investigation. Maybe the first of its kind in AR, for sure the largest."

Konstantin gestured to the semi-ghosts shifting and blurring around them. "I'd believe you, except for the obvious impediment. We're still in AR, and there's no truth in AR."

He took another drag on his cigarette and, to her surprise and revulsion, blew the smoke in her face this time. "After you decrypt that, give me a call."

She had felt nothing, of course, when the smoke had surrounded her head, but she could sense it sorting itself into an encrypted chunk in her in-box. "You guys watch too many old James Bond revivals on TV," she said.

The man paused with the cigarette halfway to his mouth. It hadn't shrunk at all. "What gives you that special insight?"

"Because Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan didn't smoke." She waved a hand in front of her face.

"Officer ready to depart."

Konstantin was fully reclined in the hotchair, both hands holding onto her headmounted monitor.

The lock had already disengaged and she wasted no time pulling the front open, letting in the sight of the acoustic ceiling squares in the large closet the department called her investigation booth. She braced herself for the moment when the ceiling would seem to rush toward her. Perceptions always warpedunder the influence of AR. Taliaferro had suggested this was because AR induced a serious rift between mind and body. Of course, Taliaferro had always been overly credible when it came to scare stories about AR. His initial response to the news of her rea.s.signment had been to promise her a novena.

Whatever that was. But either she was getting really good at this or she was just having a better day than usual, because the ceiling appeared to come only half the usual distance before snapping back. If that was progress, she'd take it.

She worked the headmount off and sat up carefully before giving it a thorough inspection. Your eyes may water excessively and you may find yourself drooling as well as sweating heavily, the trainer had told her during her orientation sessions. It's as if the body is protesting the simulation of activity by producing as much real activity as possible. Konstantin had thought it was probably more like stress, but n.o.body liked stress any more as an explanation for anything -- too one-size-fit-all as to be uselessly vague for insurance forms.

The trainer was a hefty young guy named Tonic who had never called what he was doing providing shortcuts, hints, and cheat-codes for a fee. Konstantin had been given to understand that no one in Tonic's line of work called it anything but orientation, as few people who used the service wanted to admit, even to themselves, that they needed hints and cheat-codes. No cheat-codes, no stress? OK, no habla, as the kids were saying these days. She would use the things that weren't cheat-codes and afterwards wipe the non-stress sweat out of the headmount to prevent corrosion damage. They'd stick her for repairs and she couldn't afford that -- this particular model of headmount cost the department more than she did. The front opening had jacked up the expense even more, but she had insisted on it, along with the panic b.u.t.ton program that would release the lock and allow her to bypa.s.s the protocols and open the headmount instantly. She hadn't really wanted the job as Chief Officer in charge of TechnoCrime, AR Division, but if she had to do it -- and they'd made that part clear enough -- she'd do it her way.

She peeled the hotsuit off herself by rolling it down from her neck, something that always reminded her of an old-fashioned stage drama that her ex had dragged her to, where an actress playing a nineteenth century prost.i.tute had removed her stockings by rolling them down the length of her legs. The playfully erotic qualities the actress had imbued that bit of business with escaped Konstantin completely at the moment. But then, nineteenth century stockings hadn't been lined with wires and sensors.

According to the advertisers, hotsuit wires and sensors were getting thinner and lighter all the time.

Could have been, but Konstantin found they still left their mark on her. She examined her skin, debossed with patterns that had become so familiar she thought she could probably draw them in her sleep.

Her sore muscles impressed her more. She felt as if she'd overdone it at the gym after a long period of inactivity; it was the way she always felt after a session in AR. Tonic had given her an involved explanation having to do with tension, stimulation, involuntary movements, sense memory, and how some people's bodies took situations at face value.

Or, to make a long diagnosis short, he'd added, you're what we in the profession call 'body credible.' It's all in your head, but your body won't accept that. Eventually, you'll build up a tolerance. You have to -- everybody else does. Try stretching exercises. Better yet, take up yoga.

Body credible -- the body believing what the mind knew was false. No doubt next year, they would discover the kayfabe chromosome. But it would seem that her body wasn't that credible, she thought as she eased into one of the few yoga postures that didn't bring tears to her eyes, because so far, there was no sign of this fabled tolerance that everybody else built up. Maybe her body had a mind of its own; maybe it figured that it was being cheated out of something so it insisted on cramping her muscles.

As if in confirmation, her left foot seized up and she fell over onto the carpet, rubbing her instep and pushing her toes back hard. The cramp ebbed, renewed, ebbed again. She got up and limped around the room, trying to coax her foot back to normalcy.

So what had that been about, she wondered, dressing slowly and carefully, in case some other muscle decided to mutiny. What was that message -- don't mess with the flesh? Muscular convulsions are transplanted headaches? If we are the sum of our parts, why don't they add up?

Or was that last one something she'd seen spray-painted in glitter on the side of the diet clinic thatBruce Ogada had urged everyone in the department to join? Everyone, but especially those whose movements tended to occur more often in AR than in whatever they were calling the real world these days -- common reality and consensual reality were two other terms Konstantin was steadfastly refusing. Others included mainstream reality, ground floor, home base, and purgatory.

She managed one more yoga-style stretch and then finished dressing. The navy blue uniform tunic felt a bit tighter across the shoulder blades and the stretch waistband of her trousers seemed close to the limit. Great, she thought, stepping into her shoes and pausing while the inner soles remembered the contours of each foot. Maybe she could convince Ogada that her credible body was getting muscle-bound. All that transcutaneous muscle stimulation, chief -- it's making me bigger than Man-Mountain Gentian. Ogada had dedicated himself to a crusade against preventable health problems in the work force, and obesity related ailments were at the top of his list. Konstantin had been tempted to put on ten pounds just to test his patience. Taliaferro had suggested kiddingly that she hire herself out as a professional irritant, unaware that her ex had made the same suggestion a few days before moving out.

"Well? And? Yes?" Bruce Ogada rubbed his hands together as if he were trying to start a fire in mid-air over his desk.

Konstantin nodded. "Got the arms dealer dead to rights. She whipped it out and showed it to me, you can see it plain as anything on the archive footage. Blatant piracy, industrial espionage, theft of credit, aggravated mopery and dopery."

Ogada stared at her, mystified.

"Sorry, private terms," she said. "I have to keep reminding myself I'm doing important work, chasing down these brazen infringers of copyright and scuttling patent pirates on the high seas."

Ogada didn't take offense; Konstantin didn't think he could. "For years, they couldn't get Scarface on criminal charges or racketeering. You know, Capone? Always gave the authorities the slip.

But then they had an accountant go after him, and then they got him good. Clamped him for cheating on his taxes." He smiled as if he had just related one of his own personal triumphs. Konstantin had lost count of the number of times he'd told her this one. On the other hand, he wasn't playing Guess Your Weight with her, either.

"I know -- criminal heirs of Scarface."

"If I've told you once, I've told you seven hundred times," Ogada said, nodding.

"Seven hundred and one, I think," Konstantin told him. "But really, who's counting?"

Ogada frowned at her like a disapproving father. "You're getting that unreal feeling again, aren't you?"

"'Fraid so," said Konstantin, feeling sheepish.

"Too bad. Shake it off. Go have a workout at the gym -- personally, I think you could use it -- or take a walk, talk to the shrink on call, whatever you need to do to feel real again. Take all the time you need. Up to an hour. Then clean up your archive footage and have it in my inbox so we can go over it with the DA."

Konstantin unrolled the slender cushioned mat she had been issued last year along with everyone else, during the mercifully brief transcendental meditation revival. She slid it as far under her desk as it would go and stretched out. The ambient noise in the office worked for her the way ocean surf or rain worked for other people; she was out in a matter of moments.

It was generally understood that, if anyone asked, she was meditating.

She hadn't always slept so brazenly or, for that matter, so easily. In her youth, it was as if her motor had always been running with the idle set on high; insomnia, she would say, is my middle name.

Eventually, the buzz of excess energy began to fade as she grew older, but her best sleep had not started until after her ex had moved out.

No... no, that wasn't quite right and she knew it. She was even admitting it to herself these days.

She hadn't slept so well until her ex had moved out and she had made her first truly extended foray intoArtificial Reality. AR. Known to the more credible, the stubbornly optimistic, and the socially doomed as Alternative Reality, a term she was avoiding as doggedly as ground floor.

The strange part for Konstantin was that there was no real connection between the two events. It had been nothing more than coincidence that her ex had chosen to move out on the day she had caught the call on the murdered kid in the AR parlor. Perhaps it had been knowing that there wouldn't be anyone at home from then on that had made her feel a little more dedicated to the job and at the same time, a little more reckless than she would have been otherwise. Or maybe she'd have elected to investigate the crime by hunting the killer in AR no matter what had happened that morning. She had no insight on that even now that the case had been closed and the loose ends had been tied up or tucked away, and she couldn't think of anyone who would.

Meanwhile, time pa.s.sed, life went on, and that strange j.a.panese woman continued in her bizarre non-sleep/non-coma/non-braindead state. Would she ever wake up or would she remain... inert?

Perhaps the exotic Joy Flower, currently resident in a correction facility that neither corrected nor facilitated much of anything, could have said. Or maybe not. The point was moot, since Joy Flower never said anything at all. Probably the wisest course, considering the c.o.c.ktail of drugs that Flower had had visited on her via her Boyz. If the world continued without justice -- and why not -- Konstantin could foresee the time when Flower would eventually walk free, while poor Yuki Something-Or-Other persisted in the non-conscious state that the neurologists insisted wasn't exactly a coma. As the feeding and waste conduits performed their functions, her body continued to age and breathe on its own, the foetal curling that was typical of the comatose nowhere near as p.r.o.nounced as it should have been. Brain activity was strange as well; something was happening in there, the doctors said, but it wasn't the sort of thing that manifested as the usual waves measured by an EEG.

Technically, Konstantin's only concern was how this affected the charges to be filed against Joy Flower; personally, she was completely bewildered, a condition she was becoming all too familiar with.

Sometimes, she thought the only thing in the world that she could understand was the graph Taliaferro had once drawn for her of a parabola approaching zero. This, he said, pointing to the line, is our understanding. Of anything. Or, what the h.e.l.l, everything. It approaches zero constantly without ever getting there, thus enabling us to understand less and less all the time. If it ever actually reached zero, there would be nothing left not to understand and the universe would be annihilated. The fact that they had both been pretty annihilated themselves on some old-style, non-technical but very high-powered gin had probably contributed to Taliaferro's erudition and her ability to comprehend it. Nonetheless, comprehension had remained, even after she'd slept off everything else.

Ogada had said the biggest favor the non-coma woman could do any of them, including herself, was die, if for no other reason than to allow them finally to clamp Flower to her murder. Konstantin would have agreed, but only if the sentence could have been the same period of time in the same inert state. This new streak of eye-for-eye-ism in Konstantin surprised her, though sometimes she thought she would have been surprised if she hadn't developed it, after nearly a decade on the job.

And now the job had changed on her, right under feet while she'd thought she'd thought she'd been standing on solid ground. TechnoCrime -- what the h.e.l.l was TechnoCrime?

Crime with a techno prefix, Celestine had suggested, smirking. Brilliant, yes, thank you so much.

Celestine along with her partner DiPietro had been a.s.signed to Konstantin's authority on an as-needed basis. She loaned them to auto theft as often as possible.

Privately, however, she had to admit Celestine had had more of a point than she would ever openly acknowledge. Crime out here = crime in there, QED, you're welcome, next case. As near as Konstantin could tell, however, almost all the crime in question seemed to be copyright infringement, product piracy, industrial espionage, or what had once been called bunco -- fraud and confidence games.

The last was nearly impossible to prosecute, given the standing rule that nothing in AR const.i.tuted what the lawyers liked to call a legitimate contract.

Or, as the screens were obliged by law to remind you before each and every session in AR, nothing was true, everything was a lie, and all of it in billable time.

But -- thank heaven -- not her billable time. Your tax dollars at work, brothers and sisters andnetizens of every shade between and among. They all expected a lot for their money, too, just like they always had. Apres VR, le deluge -- the complaints poured in until finally a portion of those precious tax dollars had had to be allocated for some administrative layers to filter real complaints from the chaff.

Konstantin didn't know anything about the chaff and didn't want to.

Meanwhile, her request for a full crew had remained in a special sort of limbo where it looked as if it were being acted on while its due date expired, requiring her to refile. As an administrative strategy, she had to admit it was brilliant -- she was responsible for keeping an eye on the due date and refiling. After a while, most people gave up, figuring it was better to take a hint than press the point. To Konstantin's surprise, whoever, her request had been allowed a period much longer than usual before she would have to refile in order to ensure the request didn't lose its place and get shuffled to the bottom of the pile. It almost made her believe that Ogada, or the powers above him, actually took her seriously, even if experience told her it was more likely that they were hoping she'd get busy and forget all about it.

After all, giving her a full-time, fully-trained crew would, in effect, be giving her a subdivision to lead and that, in turn, would be a promotion. Not just any promotion, but a very serious promotion, into the ranks of the decision-makers. At the lowest level, but still -- her parabola would start to approach Ogada's zero, so to speak, and that would mean he could no longer exercise his ability to be oblivious to her.

Or maybe she was being too hard on Ogada. G.o.d only knew what his parabola was approaching, or what it would annihilate if it got there.

Her thoughts turned, slowly and without any urgency, to what the rest of the day might hold. Other than going over the report with Ogada, she would probably review whatever complaints made it through to her desktop. For the millionth time, she wished Taliaferro could have been rea.s.signed with her, but his claustrophobia had made him no-go. Arguing that he could function as her outside back-up cut no ice with Ogada. You can't have someone who never goes in, he'd said. That would be like having a street cop who never went out. What kind of police work is that?

It had been like resisting the straight line from G.o.d, but somehow she had managed to keep herself from giving him an answer. As it was, she already got away with plenty on the grounds of feeling unreal after a session in AR -- unreal, in the sense that she was unable to take anything very seriously for a certain period of time after coming out, until she could decompress. Early on, even she herself had thought it was a convenient excuse for undisciplined behavior bordering on insubordination. She could even hear how it might play out in court: Your Honor, this officer was suffering from diminished capacity due to a case of the psychic bends.

But the surprise had come when the police psychiatrist had produced a report confirming it as an actual syndrome and recommending recovery time immediately after all sessions in AR. Just as you would for any other undercover a.s.signment, the doctor had added, sealing the argument so airtight that even Ogada couldn't find a hole in it. So she got all the time she needed. Up to an hour.

The alarm on her watch was chiming politely when she felt a soft tap on the sole of her left foot, which immediately threatened to cramp again. "I know, I know," she said, using the sides of her desk to slide herself out from under, mat and all. DiPietro was standing over her looking amused but then DiPietro didn't seem to have any other expressions. As if to counter his partner's excessively wide muttonchops, he had recently gone completely hairless, eyebrows and eyelashes included.

"I was meditating," Konstantin said, sitting up. "You're supposed to know that."

"I do know it," DiPietro said. "And when you lie on your back, we all know it. Ogada sent me down here to get you immediamento."

"He's supposed to know I'm meditating, too," said Konstantin as she pushed herself slowly to her feet. Maybe she could stand to lose a few kilos, she thought grumpily.

"He does," said the officer, offering her a hand she ignored. "But the DA's schedule doesn't know it. Oh, and by the way, the action's come through on your request for a crew."

Konstantin grunted. "Don't tell me -- he woke me early so he can tell me they said no."

"No, they said yes. Actually, what they said was, they'd already said yes to begin with," DiPietroadded. "You've got me and Celestine. When you're not loaning us to auto-theft. That's as good as it's going to get. Unquote."

Konstantin nodded, resigned. She should have known.

The DA was a hardbody named Harlowe Featherstonehaugh. Konstantin had met her before. She was very young and very tall, slightly over six feet, with a smooth, short cap of hair the color of a thundercloud and the biggest biceps Konstantin had ever seen outside of a bodybuilding convention. And she'd really only seen that on television. Featherstonehaugh was another oddity of p.r.o.nunciation like Taliaferro, who insisted on spelling his name one way and p.r.o.nouncing it another -- Featherstonehaugh came out as "fanshaw," for reasons only Featherstonehaugh and possibly G.o.d knew. Private joke, maybe, the DA's personal equivalent of mopery and dopery.

She found Featherstonehaugh appealing for the way she tended to loom over Ogada without realizing it. Today, Ogada had decided to handle that simply by giving the DA his chair while she looked at the footage of the weapons dealer Konstantin had taken. He was trying to loom over her but the best he could manage was breathing down her neck.

"Solid work," Featherstonehaugh said approvingly, smiling at Konstantin cheerfully. "No trouble indicting on this. What else have you got?"

Konstantin frowned and looked at Ogada, who was gazing at her expectantly, and maybe a little evenly. "What else?" she said after a moment. "What else would there be?"