“Now I can phone home!” Palloid exulted, forgetting his vow of silence. “Wait’ll I tell myself what I’ve seen! It’ll be a rush of an inload.”

Alexie tilted her head, eyes narrowing, perhaps recognizing something about Pal’s speech rhythm. I didn’t give her time to follow the thought.

“My pa — my little friend and I both need secure web access,” I said. “Do you have a couple of chadors we can use?”

After an uncertain pause, she nodded, then pointed to a coatrack. Two black, shapeless garments hung next to a desk. “They’ve been cleaned recently. No bugs.”

“That’ll do fine, thanks.” I started toward the coatrack.

“Just so you know,” she added, “I subscribe to Waryware Services, so don’t try to pull any scams or illegal stuff while using our access. Take that kind of crap elsewhere.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Alexie frowned. “Can I trust you both not to touch anything else up here, while I go back and help more patients?”

Palloid nodded vigorously. “We’ll repay this kindness,” I assured.

“Hm. Maybe you can explain to me sometime how it is that you’re still walking around, so long after you should be slurry.”

“Sometime. I will.”

She departed with a final dubious look. As her footsteps vanished downstairs, I gave Palloid a questioning glance. “All right!” he answered with a lithe shrug. “So maybe she’s better than I deserved. Shall we get on with it now? Kaolin won’t stay fooled for long.”

My little friend leaped onto the desk and I helped him slip under a chador, so the active hood covered him, adjusting to his strange body plan. I threw the other garment over my head and let its black drapery flow over my arms, down past my waist. From the outside, I now looked like some shrouded creature from those dark days, half a century ago, when a third of the countries on Earth forced women to veil their faces and forms under shapeless tents of muslin and gauze. A repressive move that backfired when the old, confining chador transformed into something completely liberating.

From within -

I was suddenly in another universe. The wonderful cosmos of VR, where data and illusion mix in profusions of color and synthetic depth. Sensors under the garment felt the positions of my arms, fingertips, and each puff of breath, reacting to every grunt from my simulated larynx. A few muttered commands, and within seconds I had three active globe-worlds set up.

The first one zoomed toward a smoldering ruin where my house … Albert’s house … had been. Freeware correlators swooped in from the surrounding webscape begging for permission to fetch data for me about this tragic event. A couple of the agents had good reputations, so I posed a few parameters and unleashed them. At the first curiosity layer, it wouldn’t cost a penny and there’d be no possibility of a backtrace. Nothing to distinguish me from millions of other net voyeurs. These were major news events, so my enquiries shouldn’t attract any attention till I probed close to bone.

My second bubble skimmed news reports about the sabotage attempt at Universal Kilns. I wanted the official police summary — especially to see if Albert was still a suspect. Also, any event like this one attracted all sorts of conspiracy theories and minority reports, offered by whistle-blower clubs, accountability hobbyists, solitary paranoiacs, autonomous whatif agents or wandering yesbut avatars. And if none of those were on the right track, I might post one of my own! Anonymous rumormongering is a venerable kind of mischief that has its own special place. realAlbert would be much better at this. And one of his ebonies would be better still.

Me? I’m just a green and a frankie. But I’m all that’s left.

While those two bubbles churned at the edges, fizzing with correlative foam, I made ready a third, more dangerous than the others.

The just-in-case cache, where Albert kept his backup files, in case anything happened to our house computer.

Suppose Nell detected the incoming missile … even bare seconds before it struck. According to programming, she would have dumped as much data as possible into the remote cache. That record might let me glimpse what my maker was doing — possibly even thinking — the very minutes that he died.

A big prize. But accessing it could be risky. Whoever sent that missile must’ve been surveilling the house, in order to be sure Albert was there when it struck. But how intense was the scrutiny? Did they simply prowl around outside with mini-cameras, keeping track of Al’s comings and goings? What if they managed to penetrate his privacy shields, say by floating a micro-spy inside the house? It happens now and then. Technology keeps changing and the cams keep getting smaller. Only fools count on their secrets staying safe forever.

Someone out there may know everything, including the location of the cache. Lurker software could be waiting to pounce on anyone who tries accessing it. A borrowed chador won’t mask me for long.

But what choice did I have? My only alternative was to head over to Pal’s place and get drunk together till this artificially extended pseudolife finally expired.

Well, feh to that! I typed with waggling fingertips and muttered some phrases under the chador’s sheltering drapery, hoping that Albert didn’t change passwords on me after learning he had made his first frankie.

Almost at once I found myself looking at a pretty good facsimile of Nell.

Experts claim there’s no such thing as true digital intelligence, and never will be. I guess they ought to know by now. It’s another of those “failed dreams” from TwenCen science fiction that never came true, like flying saucer aliens. Still, simulation has become a high art, and it doesn’t take much of an animated program to fool most folks with a well-made talking head … at least for a couple of turings.

Her face was originally modeled after a junior professor I had a brief thing for, back in college. Sexy without being overly distracting. A personification of efficiency without imagination. In addition to demanding and verifying the next-level password, the avatar scanned my face and sent a short-range probe to the pellet buried in my forehead.

Normally, that should be enough. But not this time.

“Dissonance. You appear to be Tuesday’s green, yet you wear gray dye and should have expired by now. Access to cache denied until a plausible explanation is given.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. Here’s your explanation. Briefly, the research guys at Universal Kilns have discovered a way to extend ditto lifespan. That explains why I’m talking to you. The breakthrough appears to have triggered some kind of conflict between Vic Aeneas Kaolin and Dr. Yosil Maharal. It’s possible this led to Maharal’s murder. And the murder of Albert Morris.”

The animated face contorted — a caricature of doubt. I had to remind myself, this wasn’t the Nell I remembered. Only a phantom, a replica that had been stashed in some corner of the vast datasphere, operating in a patch of rented memory.

“Your explanation of the discrepancy in your lifespan is deemed plausible, given other information that was cached by Tuesday’s ebony before the explosion. However, a new dissonance must be resolved before I can give you access.”

“What new dissonance?”

Nell’s phantom did a good approximation of her disapproving frown, a familiar programmed nuance that I never cared for. It generally appeared at times when I was being particularly dense.

“There is no convincing evidence that Albert Morris was murdered.”

If I were real, I’d have coughed and sputtered. “No convincing — ? What kind of smoking gun do you need? Isn’t it murder when somebody blows you up in a bloody missile attack?”

I had to remind myself, this wasn’t a real or clay person to be argued with — or even a top-level AI. For a software-cache phantom, the shadow-Nell looked good. But it must be damaged, or caught in a semantic bind.