She headed for the back of the unit, hunting real company. Fiona was sitting on top of a dead cornucopia box, wearing black leggings and a T-shirt locked to the output from an entropy pool. She was chatting to a boy wearing a pressure suit liner with artfully slashed knees. The spod clutched a nebulizer, and was gesticulating dreamily. Fi looked up and called, “Wednesday!”

“Fi!” Wednesday leaned forward and hugged her. Fiona’s breath was smoky. “What is this, downer city?”

Fi shrugged. “Sammy said make it dumb, but not everyone got it.” (On the dance floor Miss Ball Gag was having difficulty communicating with some boy in a black rubber body-stocking who wanted to dance: their sign language protocols were incompatible.) Fi smiled. “Vinnie, meet Wednesday. You want a drink, Wednesday?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Fi snapped her fingers and Vinnie blinked slowly, then shambled off in the direction of the bar. “Nice guy, I think, under the dumb layer. I dunno. I didn’t want to get wasted before everybody else, know what I mean?”

Wednesday hitched up her sarong and jumped up on the box beside Fi. “Ack. No uppers? No inverse-agonists?”

Fiona shook her head. “House rules. You want to come in, you check your IQ at the door. Hear the jammers?”

“No.” When she said it, Wednesday suddenly realized that she could: the pink noise field was like tinnitus, scratching away at the edges of her implant perceptions. Does Herman talk to Sam? she wondered. “So that’s what’s got to Pig.”

“Yeah. He’s cute when he’s thick, isn’t he?” Fi giggled a bit and Wednesday smiled — sepulchrally, she hoped, because she didn’t really know how Fi expected her to respond. “ ’Sa good excuse. Get dumb, get dumber, stop thinking, relax.”

“You been at it already?” Wednesday kept her voice down.

“Yeah. Just a bit.”

“Too bad. Was hoping to talk about—”

“Shh.” Fi leaned against her. “I am going to get in Vinnie’s pants tonight, see if I don’t!” She pointed at the spod who was swaying back and forth, and working his way toward them. “Ass so tight you could drop him and he’d bounce.”

The music was doing things to him and to Fi that sent a stab of jealousy all the way from Wednesday’s amygdala to her crotch. She smoothed her skirt down. “What do you expect to find in his pants? A catfish?”

Fi giggled again. “Listen, just this once! Relax. Let go, ducky. Stop thinking, fuck like a bunny, learn the joy of grunt. Can’t you switch off?”

Wednesday sighed. “I’ll try.” Vinnie was back. Wordlessly he held out a can of grinning neural death. She took it, hoisted a toast to higher cerebral shutdown, tried to chug it — ended up coughing. The night was young, the air full of augmentation jammers and neuroleptics and alcohol, and the party was just beginning to mix down to the right level of trancelike zombie heaven that high-pressure synthetic geniuses needed to switch off and groove.

A long way down to the unthinking depths. She briefly wondered if she’d meet Pig down there and find him attractive.

In the end it wasn’t Pig; it was a boy called Blow, green skin and webbing between his fingers and toes — but not his cock and balls — and she ended up on his arm giggling at a string of inane puns. He’d slipped a hand into the slit in her skirt but politely gone no farther and left it to her to pop the question, which she did for reasons that escaped her in the morning except that he’d been clean and well-mannered, and none of her usual fuckfriends were around and free, and she felt so tense …

… and the poor lad had ended up staying with her half the night just to give her a back rub, after she’d finished screaming and clawing his buttocks in one of the antisound-curtained alcoves at the sides of the dance floor.

“You’re really tight,” he said in amazement, kneading away at one shoulder.

“Oh, you bet.” Her jacket had crawled into one corner and curled protectively around the rest of her gear. She lay facedown on the pad, damp and sweaty and postorgasmic and a bit stoned, trying to let go and relax, as he worked on her upper back. “Aaah.”

He paused. “Want to talk about it?” he asked.

“Not really,” she mumbled.

After a moment he went back to prodding at the sore patch on her left shoulder blade. “You should relax.” Rub. “It’s a party. Was it someone here? Or someone else?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and he broke off from trying to get her back to relax.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, what do you want?” he asked, beginning to sound annoyed. “I could be out there.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it.

“Then go.” She reached backward and grabbed his thigh blindly, contradicting herself. “Stay. I’m not sure.” She was always bad at handling this, the difficult morning-after socializing that went with a one-off fuck with someone who she didn’t know. “Why do you have to talk?”

“Because you’re interesting.” He sounded serious, which was a bad sign. “I haven’t met you before. And I think I like you.”

“Oh.” She glanced over at the dance floor, legs moving in irregular strobing flashes of light only a meter or two from their sweaty nest. He smelled of some kind of musk, and the faint tang of semen. She rolled over on her back, fetching up against the padded back of the recess, and looked at him. “You got something else in mind?”

He stared at her sleepily. “If you want to swap links, maybe we could meet up some other time?”

I’m being propositioned! she realized, startled. Not just sex. “Maybe later.” She looked him up and down, mentally dressing him, wondering what it would be like. A boyfriend? Tension clawed at her, an unscratchable itch. She glanced at her hand. “My phone’s turned off, and I can’t switch it back on.”

“If that’s—”

“No!” She grabbed his hand: “I’m really, not, uh, being—” She pulled him towards her. “Oh.” That wasn’t the right answer, was it? she thought, as the slide of hot skin against her — and the interesting drugs they’d been taking — made the breath catch in her throat and brought a twitch of life to his groin. She reached out and caught him in her hands. “No swapping links. Just tonight. Make it like it’s your last, best time.” Cunning fingers found a nipple. “Oh, that’s too easy.” And it was back into the unthinking depths, with a frogman called Blow to be her skin pilot and a nagging tension at the back of her skull, banished for the moment by an exchange of lust.

Wednesday came awake suddenly, naked and sticky and alone on the foam pad. It still smelled of Blow. The dance floor action was going, but more slowly, the music ratcheting toward a false dawn shutdown. She felt alone for a moment, then cold. Damn, she thought hazily. He was good. Should have swapped—

There was a set of rings on the pad next to her. And a self-heating coffee can set solicitously close to them.

“What the fuck?” She shook her head, taking stock. What a guy. She felt a momentary stab of loss: someone who’d take time out from a party to give her a back rub after making skinny, even if she hadn’t wanted to talk … that was worth knowing. But he’d left a set of rings. She picked them up, puzzling. They looked to be about the right size. Still puzzled, she flipped the heater tab on the coffee and slid her own rings off, pulled the new set on, and twitched them alive. Instead of the half-expected authentication error, there was a tuneful chord and a smell of rose blossom as they glommed on to her implants and registered her as their rightful owner. Fully authenticated, with access to a whole bunch of stuff that was now instantiating itself in her implants from off a public server somewhere: “Wow! Hey, voice mail. Any word from Herman?” she asked.

“Retrieving. You have a noninteractive message. Hello, Wednesday. This is Herman. Your instructions are as follows. Do not go home. Go to Transit Terminal B. There is a ticket waiting for you there, booked under the authority of professor-gymnast David Larsen, for your participation in a student work placement project. Collect the ticket and leave this hab immediately. Retain these rings, they’re keyed to a new identity and set up to route packets to you via a deep market anonymizer. You cannot be traced through them. I will contact you in due course. Let me emphasize that you should not, under any circumstances, go home.” Click.