As far as Radmila could tell, there was little more to this pricey dream machine than Californian hype. The pleasant flashing lights, the droning swoony ambient noises, and the so-called aroma «therapy» had done nothing much for her, or to her. Still, given that she was one of the product's sponsors and it was quite a handsome little earner, she saw no harm in using it.

Radmila climbed into the pod and clicked it shut. This time, as she fell into a pleasant doze, something about the pod's routine touched her brain-not with the harshness of an Acquis neural intrusion, but in a civilized, consumer-friendly fashion.

Radmila tumbled into a lucid, prophetic dream.

She dreamed that John had come home. John was not the gloomy, burdened, and apologetic philanderer whose company she dreaded. No, he was the younger John, the daring swain who had discovered her. In Los Angeles, Radmila had tried so hard to be a skulking stateless nameless thing, and yet John had located her, and John knew who she was and where she came from. He even cared about her and what happened to her.

She had little more to offer this prince than sweet surrender, but this seemed to be what the prince most desired from a woman in his life. Her abject emotional and sexual dependence on him steadied his self-image. He was no longer a rich young parlor radical with some rather sinister interests in emergent technologies. John Montgomery Montalban was made powerful by his marriage to her. She was his proof to himself that he had the power to transform himself and others.

Here he was back again, smiling and full of good cheer, the young John, the tech magician, and he had brought her mysterious gifts, as he always liked so much to do: two of his black hobby-objects. One hobject was a fizzing black shoe box, and the other one was even more mysterious, high-technical, and powerful, and it was…in stern dream logic…another fizzing black shoe box…

"Eureka!" cried the young John in his ecstasy: charismatic and sexy. "I have saved the world!"

What could it be? John was so busy with his colored wires and tubes…Never a moment for her, not a smile, not a kiss or hug…The first black shoe box was nothing much, the even more sinister shoe box was nothing much either, but to connect the two shoe boxes…Of course! Networking! A network would change everything!

Now the brilliant John, with all the passionate conviction that had first won her heart, was declaiming something solemn and arcane and yet fantastically convincing about his amazing black boxes…The first was sonoluminescent cold fusion, a host of screaming tiny bubbles hotter than the surface of the sun…

Banging on the shoe box, yes, John cried, sonoluminescence, a true miracle technology that had never quite worked yet.

The second fizzing black box was chemosynthetic black bubbling slime straight from the Freudian bottom of the ocean…It was a true biological miracle, it made life from darkness and nothing, it could live on pure volcano goo…John was pulling the black volcano goo out of his black box as he ranted about it to no one in particular, it was stinking of primeval sulfur, it was oily, drippy, satanic, it was all over his hands, it was running down his perfect sleeves like black blood…

Bubbling wildly as it dribbled, spewing oxygen in fizzing sheets, it was the stuff of breath and life, this stinky chemo goo bubbling merrily like California champagne…

The radiation from the fusion bubbles was wildly stimulating the black slime bubbles, somehow it was exactly what the germs needed to do their magic. The radiation was a tonic to the magic germs, it made their metabolism a hundred times more efficient, no, a thousand times, a million times…

Her husband's black boxes were slurping poison out of the air, just vacuuming carbon dioxide, fizzing like reverse geysers now, all yeasty and industrial…

She wanted to laugh wildly in her dread and ecstasy, for the two black bubbling boxes were sucking centuries of industrial poison out of the sky, just gobbling pollution and turning it back into coal and crude oil, literally tearing the filth right out of the firmament ! The unhealthy sky under which she had passed her whole life was peeling back before her dreaming eyes like a wrinkled skin on badly scalded milk…and behind that skein of horror and decline and utter hopelessness, the revitalized sky was blue, blue, bluer-than-bluebird blue…

Radmila's eyes shocked open. She tore herself from the gentle grip of the hallucination. She pried herself from the oneiric pod…She lay breathing shallowly on the color-coded elastic floor of the new gym…Her head was reeling. What on Earth had that machine done to her? It had torn something loose within her, something dark and ugly and yet integral to her being…It had oiled and loosened up some ancient trauma within her…It had popped off of her like a rust flake.

She had lost something dark and complicated deep within herself. She was a different person now. Freer, much easier at heart. She felt footloose. Mellowed. Agile and even giggly. Full of honest joy.

She stared at a fluffy morning cloud through the tinted panels of the roof. "Oh my God," she told the cloud, "I've finally become a Californian."

RADMILA AND TODDY HAD ALWAYS ATTENDED the same hairdressing lab. This salon lab was an intensely private place, likely the best such lab in the world. Staffed by committed cosmeceutical professionals, it was chilly, hushed, and cheerless. That state-of-the-art establishment was much frequented by the political elite. Generally Toddy and Radmila went there together, arriving in a Family limo with darkly tinted windows, then departing under deep cover.

Sometimes there were clouds of hobject spyplanes whizzing over the place, all run by paparazzi idiots with websites. These toys never got anywhere and never saw a thing, for the hairdressing lab was the single most secure locale that Radmila knew.

Radmila had spent a great deal of the Family's money at the hair designers'-for the Family partly owned the lab. This fact didn't make the local hair designers treat Radmila any better. On the contrary.

Presented with a fresh surge of Family capital, they had simply and brusquely ripped out all of her hair. The new implants, their roots soaked in fresh stem cells, were state-of-the-art: radiant blond filaments that were genuine human hair, but with a much-enhanced ability to behave.

Radmila's damaged scalp was soaked with hot, wet, antiseptic foam. Her head was locked by a stainless fume hood where robot surgical arms whirred on tracks, took unerring aim, and deftly pierced her scalp. Implanting fresh hair took forever, like being tattooed. And, of course, it hurt a great deal.

Any session at the hair lab was always boring and painful. Today it was extravagantly painful, but it was no longer boring.

Because her brother Djordje had demanded an audience with her. And, so as to show Glyn that she had fully renounced all her troubles-she had agreed to meet Djordje in person.

With a final vindictive burst of needling at the nape of her neck, the hairdressing robot finished stitching her scalp. A somber, white-suited technician arrived, removed the metal hood, rinsed her deftly, and wrapped her head in a hot medicated turban.

The fresh implants twitched in her violated scalp, itching like lice. Few women in modern Los Angeles knew what lice were like, but Radmila was one of them. Toddy Montgomery had known what lice were like, too. Lila Jane Dickey-the larval, teenage form of Toddy Montgomery-she had known about lice, and she had known much worse things.

"So-you really don't hate me anymore?" Djordje said, rocking on his heels and watching her as she suffered. It was terrible to have Djordje standing so close to her. He was literally consuming her air.