And I used to think recovering from an ordinary rejuvenation was humiliating enough.

“Hello, Wyobie,” Hoshe Finn said. “You’re looking better this time. Remember me?”

“Policeman,” Wyobie Cotal whispered. His voice was amplified by the suit, producing a weird echo effect.

“That’s right: Detective Finn. And this is Chief Investigator Paula Myo from the Serious Crimes Directorate. She’s come all the way from Earth to look into your death.”

Wyobie Cotal’s weary eyes focused on Paula. “Do I know you?”

“No.” She wasn’t about to start explaining her notoriety to someone who was struggling to make sense of his small stock of memories. “But I would like to help you.”

He smiled, which allowed drool to leak from his mouth. “You’re going to break me out of here?”

“It won’t be much longer.”

“Liar!” He said it loud enough that the amplification circuit wasn’t triggered. “They said I’ll be here for months while my muscles grow. Then I’ll just have a kid’s body. The speed-up growing part has stopped now.”

“But you’re alive again.”

He closed his eyes. “Find them. Find who did this to me.”

“If you were killed, I will find them. I always do.”

“Good.”

“I understand you and Tara Jennifer Shaheef were sex partners.” Paula ignored the way Hoshe Finn winced behind his filter mask. The amount of time they could spend with Cotal was limited by his condition; she didn’t intend on wasting any of it.

“Yes.” The expression on the strange child-face softened. “We’d just started seeing each other.”

“You know she left Oaktier as well.”

“I know. But I can’t believe I ran off with her, there was too much for me here. I told the police before. I was seeing another girl, too.”

“Philipa Yoi, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Was she the jealous type?”

“No no, I’ve been through all this before. It was all just fun, nothing too serious. We all knew that. Philipa and I were first-lifers, we wanted to… live.”

“It was just fun at the time of your last memory backup into the clinic’s secure store. But you didn’t leave Oaktier for another nine weeks after that. A lot could have happened in that time.”

“I wouldn’t have left,” he repeated stubbornly.

“Had anybody mentioned taking any trips? Were any friends planning a holiday on another planet?”

“No. I’m sure. My head’s all weird, you know. This was just five weeks ago for me. But my whole life is jumbled up. Some of the childhood stuff is clearer than Philipa and Tara. Oh, fuck. I can’t believe anybody would want to kill me.”

“Do you know anything about Tampico?”

“No. Nothing. Why?”

“It was the planet you bought a ticket for.”

Wyobie Cotal closed his eyes. Tears squeezed out to wet the fine lashes. “I don’t know. I don’t remember any of this. This has to be a mistake. One giant mother of a mistake. I’m still out there somewhere. I must be. I just forgot to come back for my rejuvenation, that’s all. Find me, please. Find me!” He started to lift his back up off the pillow, juvenile features straining hard. “Do something.”

A nurse came in as Wyobie Cotal sank back down again. He was unconscious before the electromuscle suit finished lowering him back flat onto the bed.

“He’s been sedated,” the nurse said. “It’ll be another three hours before he’s conscious again. You can come back then if you have to, but he can’t be exposed to an unlimited number of sessions like this. His personality is still very fragile, he’s completely immature emotionally.”

“I understand,” Paula said. She and Hoshe Finn left the room together.

“What do you think?” the detective asked as they took their coveralls off.

“Taken alone, I would have said it was a clear-cut case. First-lifers are always excitable. He went off on an adventure holiday with a girl and drowned or crashed or flew into a hill, something reckless and stupid. But with Shaheef as well, we have to consider the circumstances.”

Hoshe Finn nodded and threw his coveralls into a bin. The cooler air outside Cotal’s room made him shiver. “That’s what alerted us to this in the first place. Tara Jennifer Shaheef was re-lifed twenty years ago. She was written off as having an accident.”

“So who made the connection?”

“Morton, her past husband. Apparently, Cotal was named on the divorce papers; he was the one she was shacking up with on Tampico.”

“So it did get serious between Cotal and Shaheef?”

“Looks like it, but not on this planet. She filed the papers on Tampico. Once the divorce was arranged, Morton never heard anything from her again until her re-life. My division investigated her re-life as a matter of course, but there was nothing unduly suspicious other than the lack of a body. Accidents do happen.”

“So after the divorce Cotal and Shaheef went on holiday, or even honeymoon, together. They had the same accident.”

“Could be. Except there really is no trace of them after they left Oaktier.”

“Apart from the divorce petition.”

“Yes. And there certainly isn’t a motive for killing them. All we have are a lot of suspicious circumstances.”

“I need to see Shaheef next.”

“She’s expecting us.”

SIX

The message was loaded into the unisphere through a planetary cybersphere node in Hemeleum, a small inland farming town on Westwould. It remained in a onetime address file for five hours, long enough for whoever loaded it to have traveled clear across the Commonwealth. After five hours were up, the message’s sender segment activated. The program distributed the message to every e-butler address code in the unisphere, an annoying method of advertising called shotgunning. As a method of commercial promotion it had fallen into disuse centuries ago. Every modern e-butler program had filters that could bounce the spam right back to its sender, although as most shotgunners used a onetime address there was little point. The e-butlers also automatically notified the RIs controlling the unisphere routing protocols, who immediately wiped the offending message from every node. And under Intersolar law, finally passed in 2174, anyone shotgunning the unisphere was liable to a large irritant fine that could be applied to every message that was received by an e-butler, so the penalty was never less than a couple of billion dollars. Subsequently, shotgunning was used only by underground organizations or individuals who had ideologies, disreputable financial schemes, religious visions, or political revolution that they wanted the rest of the Commonwealth to know about. Given how quickly the unisphere RIs could identify shotgun spread patterns and block them, any software writer capable of composing a decent new shotgun sender could earn themselves a lucrative fee—cash, of course.

In this case, the factor that allowed the shotgunned message to get around most e-butler filters was that it had a genuine author certificate. On the arrival of any message, that was the first thing an e-butler would query. This one had the certificate of April Gallar Halgarth, a twenty-year-old resident of Solidade, the private world owned by the Halgarth dynasty. Over ten billion e-butlers allowed it to go forward into their hold file.

Most people upon receiving a message from a Halgarth opened it from sheer curiosity. When the visual recording started to play they realized they’d been shotgunned, and ninety percent wiped it immediately. Those who let it run did so out of native inquisitiveness, the prospect of filing a shotgun suit against a Halgarth, or because they were fellow extremist freedom fighters or it was useful raw material for their dissertation on modern political factions. A rare few simply believed.

The visuals opened with a man in an office, sitting behind a desk, with the snow-cloaked city of San Matio, Lerma’s capital, spread out panoramically through the window wall behind him. His face boasted strong features that were highlighted by dark skin, while neatly trimmed brown hair was threaded with a few silver strands. It emphasized the kind of authoritative air that inspired confidence, marking him down as a positive, progressive leader. (Forensic analysis showed he was a graphics composite, designed by the Formit 3004 simulator package, using its politician sculpture function.)