Maria felt a flicker of unease. Each time she stopped to remind herself that these worlds would never exist -- not even in the sense that a culture of A. lamberti "existed" -- the whole project seemed to shift perspective, to retreat into the distance like a mirage. The work itself was exhilarating, she couldn't have asked for anything more, but each time she forced herself to put it all into context -- not in the Autoverse, but in the real world -- she found herself light-headed, disoriented. Durham's reasons for the project were so much flimsier than the watertight internal logic of the thing itself; stepping back from the work was like stepping off a rock-solid planet and seeing it turn into nothing but a lightly tethered balloon.

She stood and walked over to the window, and parted the curtains. The street below was deserted; the concrete glowed in the hyperreal glare of the midday sun.

Durham was paying her good money -- money that would kelp get Francesco scanned. That was reason enough to press on. And if the project was ultimately useless, at least it did no harm; it was better than working on some hedonistic VR resort or some interactive war game for psychotic children. She let the curtain fall back into place and returned to her desk.

The cloud floated in the middle of the workspace, roughly spherical, rendered visible in spite of the fact that its universe was empty of stars. That was a shame; it meant the future citizens of Lambert were destined to be alone. They'd have no prospect of ever encountering alien life -- unless they built their own computers, and modeled other planetary systems, other biospheres.

Maria said, "Recalculate. Then show me sunrise again."

She waited.

And this time -- -false colors, by definition -- the disk of the sun was bright cherry red, beneath a thick bank of clouds streaked orange and violet, spread across the sky -- and the whole scene was repeated, stretched out before her, shimmering, inverted. Mirrored in the face of the waters.

+ + +

By a quarter to eight, Maria was thinking about logging off and grabbing some food. She was still on a high, but she could feel how close she was coming to the point where she'd be useless for the next thirty-six hours if she pushed herself any further.

She'd found a range of starting conditions for the cloud which consistently gave rise to hospitable versions of Lambert, along with all the astronomical criteria she'd been aiming for -- except for the large satellite, which would have been a nice touch but wasn't critical. Tomorrow, she could begin the task of providing A. lamberti with the means of surviving alone on this world, manufacturing its own nutrose from thin air, with the help of sunlight. Other workers had already designed a variety of energy-trapping pigment molecules; the "literal translation" of chlorophyll lacked the right photochemical properties, but a number of useful analogues had been found, and it was a matter of determining which could be integrated into the bacteria's biochemistry with the fewest complications. Bringing photosynthesis to the Autoverse would be the hardest part of the project, but Maria felt confident; she'd studied Lambert's notes, and she'd familiarized herself with the full range of techniques he'd developed for adapting biochemical processes to the quirks of Autoverse chemistry. And even if the pigment she chose, for the sake of expediency, wasn't the most efficient molecule for the task, as long as the seed organism could survive and reproduce it would have the potential to stumble on a better solution itself, eventually.

The potential, if not the opportunity.

She was about to shut down The Laplacian Casino when a message appeared in the foreground of the workspace:

Juno: Statistical analysis of response times and error rates suggests that your link to the JSN is being monitored. Would you like to switch to a more heavily encrypted protocol?

Maria shook her head, amused. It had to be a bug in the software, not a bug on the line. Juno was a public-domain program (free, but all donations welcome) which she'd downloaded purely as a gesture of solidarity with the US privacy lobby. Federal laws there still made bug-detection software, and any half-decent encryption algorithms, illegal for personal use -- lest the FBI be inconvenienced -- so Maria had sent Juno's authors a donation to help them fight the good fight. Actually installing the program had been a joke; the idea of anyone going to the trouble of listening in to her conversations with her mother, her tedious VR contract work, or her self-indulgent excursions into the Autoverse, was ludicrous.

Still, the joke had to be carried through. She popped up a word processor on the JSN -- the terminal's local one wouldn't have shown up to an eavesdropper tapping the fiber -- and typed:

Whoever you are, be warned: I'm about to display the Longford Mind-Erasing Fractal Basilisk, so

The doorbell rang. Maria checked the peephole camera's view. There was a woman on the front step, nobody she knew. Early forties, conservatively dressed. The not-so-subtle give-away was clearly visible behind her: one compact two-seater Mitsubishi "Avalon" electric car. The New South Wales Police Department were probably the only people in the world who'd bought that model, before the Bankstown factory closed down in forty-six. Maria had often wondered why they didn't give in and fit blue flashing lights to all their supposedly unmarked cars; acknowledging the situation would have been more dignified than carrying on as if nobody knew.

Dredging her memory for recent misdemeanors -- but finding none -- she hurried downstairs.

"Maria Deluca?"

"Yes."

"I'm Detective-Sergeant Hayden. Computer Fraud Squad. I'd like to ask you a few questions, if that's convenient."

Maria rescanned for guilty secrets; still no trace -- but she would have preferred a visitor from Homicide or Armed Robbery, someone who'd clearly come to the wrong house. She said, "Yes, of course. Come in." Then, as she backed away from the door, "Ah -- I nearly forgot, I suppose I should verify . . . ?"

Hayden, with a thin smile of blatantly insincere approval, let Maria plug her notepad into the socket of her Police Department badge. The notepad beeped cheerfully; the badge knew the private code which matched the current public key being broadcast by the Department.

Seated in the living room, Hayden got straight to the point. She displayed a picture on her notepad.

"Do you know this man?"

Maria cleared her throat. "Yes. His name's Paul Durham. I'm . . . working for him. He's given me some contract programming." She felt no surprise; just the jolt of being brought down to earth. Of course the Fraud Squad were interested in Durham. Of course the whole fantasy of the last three months was about to unravel before her eyes. Aden had warned her. She'd known it herself. It was a dream contract, too good to be true.

An instant later, though, she backed away from that reaction, furious with herself. Durham had paid the money into the trust fund, hadn't he? He'd met the costs of her new JSN account. He hadn't cheated her. Too good to be true was idiot fatalism. Two consenting adults had kept all their promises to each other; the fact that no outsider would understand the transaction didn't make it a crime. And after all he'd done for her, at the very least she owed him the benefit of the doubt.

Hayden said, "What kind of 'contract programming'?"

Maria did her best to explain without taking all night. Hayden was -- not surprisingly -- reasonably computer literate, and even knew what a cellular automaton was, but either she hadn't heard of the Autoverse, or she wanted to hear it all again from Maria.