That pissed me off, but not as much as Pal.

“Dammit, I wanted those memories!” he screamed, flinging his scattergun and grabbing another weapon from some recess of his chair. One glimpse made me quail. It was an evaporator.

Even battle-hardened gang members reacted with dismay, diving for cover. One was too late as a lump of unstable crystal collapsed in the firing chamber, sending a coherent blast of tuned microwaves boring right through him — and the wall behind.

Another pair arrived as reinforcements, stared at Pal, turned to flee … only to join a second wall section evaporating into oblivion.

“Behind you!” I screamed, standing to shoot my comparative popgun toward the window as Lum’s hapless greenie was trampled by fresh invaders. No sign of Beta. No surprise there.

Swiveling his chair, Pal reloaded, then blasted another bolt of disintegrating microwaves at the newcomers, vaporizing one of them plus half of another — along with the window frame and part of the fire escape beyond.

To my relief, nobody fired back at him, even though he was in the open.

They can tell he’s real and they don’t want cops involved. The most they’ll do to Pal is grab his gun and throw a tarp over him. Maybe try to force a forget-sniff up his nose, to erase the last hour or so.

Of course, that meant all the gunners turned on me. Bullets struck all around, edging closer, till Pal finished levering another crystal into place and waved the ray tube, preparing another blast. The Waxers scattered, dropping for cover, briefly giving me a respite.

Pal’s eyes met mine, releasing me from my golem duty to defend any realfolks. These gangers were playing by the rules. “I’m safe,” he growled, snatching my roll of film from the nearby holo reader and tossing it to me. “Go!”

With a quick nod to my friend, I rolled to one side, scrambled up, then dashed across the room, taking a shallow dive behind the kitchen counter just in time as sprays of pellets tore the faux-wood panels, ricocheting amid pots and pans. Thank heavens the place came furnished.

“Come on, bastards!” Pal screamed while charging his semi-illegal weapon one more time. “Pathetic, punks. Shoot me!”

There was a sob in his voice — a pain that even his best friend rarely heard. And yes, part of me sympathized, hoping Pal would finally get the kind of death he wanted. With a bang, no whimper.

They were closing in. Surely his Big Gun must be running out of fist-size charges. My own weapon had just a few rounds. I heard skirmishers approaching from three sides. It looked bad.

Then the wall behind me evaporated in a sudden cloud of hot, expanding gases.

“Gumby, run!” Pal cried.

I was already through, pounding past surprised tenants of the apartment next door — a simulacrum family who stared at me goggle-eyed, cowering behind their sofa while a cheap TV in the corner blared theme music for the Cassius and Henry Show.

Fortunately, they were all dittos, play-acting life in a more adventurous age. So I charged past them guilt-free. Any fines resulting from this interruption will be simple. Damages only. No punitives.

Anyway, who are they gonna bill?

There is something quaintly sweet and old-timey about the electronic world of “artificial intelligence” and computer-generated images.

All right, my generation tends to look down on antique hackers and cybergeezers, many of them still clinging to their vain faith in digital transcendence — a miscarried dream of super-smart machines, downloaded personalities, and virtual worlds more real than reality. It’s become a joke.

Worse, it’s turned into another hobby.

Yet, I confess that I do love this stuff. Cruising the Old Web in search of hidden info-troves. Skating from one camera view to the next. Setting up little micro-avatars to go plunging into databases that are so thick and sedimentary with more than a century’s layered gigabytes that your software emissaries come equipped with pickaxes and headlamps. You nearly always have to specify exactly what you’re looking for in order for them to draw anything useful at all.

Still, pluck and persistence can bring up gems. Like the fact that Yosil Maharal served as a highly paid consultant for the Dodecahedron.

It fits — he was a world-renowned expert in soulistics, known for original thinking. Naturally, the Dodecs — and perhaps even the President’s team in the Glasshouse — would’ve consulted Maharal, in order to plumb the next stage. Get a handle on what’s coming. Scope out what new technologies may already be in the hands of potential enemies. He was also a chief adviser and designer when they planted this giant reserve army of battle-golems deep under the Jesse Helms Range.

I learned about all this while using the secure dataport that Chen’s ditto had been leading us toward, before Ritu vanished and I had to make the little, apelike tax collector go away. Things felt bleak now, without company, though solitude allowed me to concentrate without interruption.

It seems they pretty much gave Maharal carte blanche, I realized, waggling my fingers and hands beneath an ultra-secure, government-issue chador. Several viewglobes grew and shrank, responding to my flitting eyes. One conveyed a surface map of the region, portraying the army base with its training, relaxation, tanning, and imprinting facilities, along with nearby four-star hotels that cater to avid fight fans. Some distance southwest, beyond a sheer escarpment, lay the battleground itself, where national teams fight for glory and to settle disputes without bloodshed. In a region as cratered as the Moon, a patch of desert had been sacrificed for sport, and to spare the rest of the planet from war.

That much the public knew.

Only now I could also follow a maze of tunnels and caverns below the base, heading in the opposite direction. A secret fortress created for a vast army of ready-to-serve warriors. Some portions were openly labeled. Other areas were mere vague outlines on the map, shaded to indicate stronger layers of secrecy, requiring passwords and ID verifiers I lacked. Nor did I care about that. Matters of national security didn’t interest me. What riveted my attention was the fact that this network of man-made caves appeared to stretch quite some distance eastward, beyond the formal military zone, deep below state and private lands.

Toward Urraca Mesa — I saw — the destination Ritu and I were aiming for when we first set out, Tuesday night.

Coincidence? I had already begun to suspect that Yosil Maharal chose the site of his “vacation cabin” with great care, many years ago.

Bodily pangs forced me to shrug off the chador and switch to old-fashioned viewscreens, in order to drink and eat while I worked. Fortunately, this part of the cavern was also a National Leadership Enclave — a habitat set aside for high government officials, in case of some dire emergency. Food and other provisions lay plentifully stacked on nearby shelves. At first sight, the cans and packages looked untouched, but quite a few were missing in back, as if someone had been raiding the larder, carefully rearranging intact goods up front to hide the pilferage. I availed myself of my first fully satisfying meal in two days — my tax dollars well spent, I figure — plus a double mug of fizzy Liquid Sleep. That helped a lot. Still, I found myself wishing I were black instead of organic brown. I concentrate much better when I’m ebony.

“Superimpose the location of the mountain cabin owned by Yosil Maharal,” I ordered.

The spot instantly glimmered onscreen — a flashing amber speck at the end of a winding road. If I asked to zoom closer, the computer would retrieve recent skyviews showing the house and drive, or even catalogue nearby foliage by species and chlorophyll reflectivity profiles. The cabin lay a few kilometers beyond the easternmost extension of the underground golem base, separated from my present map locale by a single oblong plateau.