“No.” Fixx shook his head and regretted it immediately. He could practically feel his brain rattling around inside its box. Besides, his scalp itched from crusted blood and he stank so bad even he wouldn’t have stood downwind of himself.

“I need a shower,” Fixx said firmly. The Japanese woman looked irritated, but she didn’t disagree. It wasn’t just stale sweat that clung to his body. The sour reek of comedown stuck like oil to his skin. Crushed fresh garlic and molecular chains broke along with the flesh, releasing that familiar stink. It was the same with blue crystalMeth.

He could scrub the smell from his skin but it would be back, and it would keep returning until he took another hit or fought clean. Word on the street was that, years back, the stink had been some Seattle biochemist’s idea of a bad joke, but if so no one had ever managed to rewrite the formula. Fixx certainly hadn’t.

They went through to the bathroom together. It might have been innocent on Shiori’s part but it certainly wasn’t where Fixx was concerned, not that it made any difference. Shiori stripped off her tight black T-shirt in a single motion, hands crossed over her front to grip the edge of her top, peeling it up and away in one clean sweep. Shiori almost had the body of a boy, Fixx decided, looking at her thin ribs, or she would have done if it hadn’t been for those small, high breasts topped with wine-dark nipples. But for all the attention she paid to Fixx he might as well have not been in the room.

Bending, Shiori stepped out of her crumpled Levis and tossed them into the corner of the bathroom, next to her T-shirt and leather boots. Watching her tight buttocks as she walked three paces across the ‘crete floor, pulled open a glass door and swung herself up into the sonic booth, Fixx realized he hadn’t seen anyone with a body that honed since CySatNY commissioned a piece on Bohemian Paris eighteen months back. There’d been a journalist hanging round the Crash&Burn, a green-eyed exec name of Passion.

She’d been good, thighs like steel, arms like whipcord and a vulva so tight she had to have put in a lifetime’s work on her pelvic floor muscles. But Shiori was younger, and Fixx was pretty sure Passion’s whole body had been a rebuild: something expensive from an offshore black clinic.

She sure as hell knew how to use it, though, wherever her body came from. She’d throated him whole and come back for more, kneeling on a bed in a wild apartment CySat owned in Montparnasse, so that fucking Passion had been like being suspended naked in the Parisian skyline. Just thinking about it hurt to bursting.

Fixx was still looking down at his erection when Shiori stepped out of the shower. They looked at each other and Fixx could almost swear he saw the Japanese woman curl her lip, then realized she probably wouldn’t do anything that obvious.

Shiori nodded at his groin. “You got a problem, you deal with it,” she said abruptly and turned her back on him, pulling the black jeans up around her hips, fixing her flies and buckling her belt before she even bothered to reach for her top.

She looked good from the back. But hell, she looked pretty neat from the front too. Fixx stripped off his clothes and stepped up into the glass booth. He’d like to do the same: set the controls to sonic and let the dirt, dead cells, sweat and microbes be blasted from his skin in a single sweep, but he couldn’t.

Brauhess marketed the cubicle as sonic, because the idea of laser cleaning still had people worried. It wasn’t as if sound wasn’t involved: it was, in three oscillating frequencies. But most of the cleaning was a rapid laser peel, so shallow that it zapped no more than the first few interlocking cells of the epidermis. What the Brauhess did was take a surface reading a nanosec ahead of the laser pulse, then take mere microns off the result.

There were rumours of pregnant women cooking their babies, fat men breathing out at the wrong time and finding their guts on the shower floor and children who forgot to close their eyes getting an involuntary corneal shave that changed their sight forever — but that was what they were, just rumours.

Urban myth had nothing to do with the reason Fixx didn’t choose the sonic option. It was simple self-preservation. Both his legs and one arm were bio-encased electronics. No way was he going to risk frying the chips.

No, he was going to shower the old way. His prosthetics might not stand a laser burst but at least they were waterproof.

Fixx let the cold trickle down his torso, slicking through body hair flecked with grey, picking up blood, dust and grit as it went. By the time he’d been under the shower for thirty seconds, the puddle at his feet was already grey with dirt, not that he could feel anything resembling water with his toes.

If he could have had his legs back, he would have done, height drop and all. Oh, they’d got him publicity, that night at the St Petersburg Palace Theatre when he stalked out on stage, half-man/half-machine. The tetsuos had been out in force, ranked along the front of the stage, providing security, whether the Russian police had wanted it or not.

And then the fights had begun, spilling out of the Palace Theatre onto Neva Prospekt. Every fucking Ishie in the city trying to eyecam the chaos without getting clubbed by some overwired member of Russia’s finest. By midnight the bells at the Armenian Church next to the theatre were being rung in descending order to announce the deaths. Fixx was finally world-famous and for more than his fifteen minutes. No one could number how many people downloaded his new sim: the Web counters just couldn’t cope. Hell, he’d claimed so much fucking bandwidth that, even with the new backbone in place, getting to his site was like drowning in treacle.

No one really knew what that meant until the media punters stopped and really thought about it. Fixx hadn’t known, not when they told him, hadn’t understood the implications at all. It only began to make sense when the credit started rolling in, the fractions of dollars, yen and euros adding up faster than his mind could comprehend.

He was more than rich, for a year or two he was beyond money. A mythical figure like Midas or the Gates-Hertoz dynasty. Fenced round with bodyguards and PAs, the bedrock of his finances so hard, so solid that stock-market dives and currency fluctuations broke against it like overwrought brokers hitting the pavement. And that’s how things should have stayed. That’s where he should have stuck...

Rubbing blood out of his hair, Fixx knew that was true. That was definitely where he should have stuck, with a firewall of tame lawyers between himself and the world. But he was addicted to grand gestures: to walking out on love affairs that weren’t entirely perfect; to throwing his cloak over puddles that nobody needed to cross. Between giving to charity, breaking his recording contract and trying to sue Bernie and his other managers for fraud, he’d spent everything he’d ever earned, moolah spiralling out of his account as fast as it had spiralled in. Half the world thought he was a long-dead saint, the other half just thought he was dead...

“You got a knife?” Fixx stuck his head round the cubicle door, watching Shiori lace and relace her boots, the old-fashioned way. He didn’t believe in any of that shit. His boots might have metal buckles all the way up the front, but they still undid at the side with a self-sealing molecular zip.

“Why?” Her eyes were amused, like she thought he might kill himself in the cubicle while she hung around fiddling with her boots.

“You want me to try shaving with a molyknife?”

Shiori didn’t even have to think about it. No one would be that stupid, not even a flake like Fixx. She flipped him her ceramic blade and Fixx caught it neatly in mid-air, by the hilt.