She sat on a chair made of bright red plastic that was too small for her. Beside her, on a similar chair, sat a child who looked about six years old with features that were a mix of heritages-Afro, Euro, and Asian. She was wearing a straight jacket whose long sleeves held her arms firmly behind her back. Tears trickled down her face as she used a stylus that was clenched between her teeth to touch the letters of a keyboard whose keys floated in space in front of her.

Floating in the air behind the child were the graphic elements of a primitive computer game from the last century that was based on a pen-and-paper game of even more ancient origins. The object of the game was to guess which letters would fill in the blanks.

The word now being displayed had eight letters. Three spaces were still blank.

A three-dimensional icon of a gallows and noose filled the air above the letters-and-blanks display. The noose was cinched tight around the neck of a girl identical in appearance to the one playing the game-except that both her legs and face were blank. Instead of warm flesh, they were cold, burnished metal-the smooth, featureless skin of a Universal Matrix Specification persona.

The girl leaned forward and touched the stylus in her teeth to the letter W on the keyboard. The W key depressed and then disappeared, and one of the blanks in the word puzzle filled itself in.

At the same time, one of the metallic legs on the girl in the noose turned into a flesh-and-blood limb.

Timea leaned forward, one hand on the girl's shoulder in an effort to catch her attention. "What are you doing?" she asked.

The girl's eyes flicked for a microsecond to Timea. They glowed with an intensity and single-minded concentration that spoke of madness. She wriggled her shoulder uncomfortably under Timea's hand, as if the straight jacket were pinching her.

"Crashing myself," she said through clenched teeth. Then she giggled.

Timea felt a ghostly ache in her left wrist as she realized who she was talking to. She glanced down at her wrist, and saw the familiar bandages of her mummy persona. The bandages that were a reminder of those they'd wrapped around her wrist, after her suicide attempt.

"Don't shut down," she told the Al. She cast about for the words to frame the reason why. "Your children need you. You can't just abandon them."

"You-" The girl lunged forward, stabbing the letter U with the stylus, and giggled again at the pun. "You don't understand." She squirmed again, wincing as the straight jacket pinched her arms.

The graphics display behind her changed as the other leg became flesh.

"Yes, I do," Timea said. She glanced nervously at the word-puzzle solution.

Only one letter to go. The girl bent forward to touch the Okey.

"Wait!" Timea grabbed the stylus, but was unable to tug it from the girl's teeth. "Think of the otaku-of those you gave birth to. You have a responsibility to them. What will they do without you?"

The girl glanced sidelong at Timea. When she released the stylus to talk, it stayed fixed in place, its tip still poised a few centimeters from the O key. No matter how hard Timea pulled against the slender wand, she could not budge it.

"You had a responsibility, too," the girl said.

"That's right," Timea answered, still pulling with all her strength on the wand. "That's what I was trying to explain to you-why I entered into resonance with you and let you see what my death was like. I wanted you to understand why I fought to stay alive. I owed it to my son not to… I couldn't let Lennon down."

"You let the children at the clinic down."

"What do you mean?" Timea didn't like the turn the conversation was taking. She kept up a steady pull on the stylus, which trembled in its urge to touch the O key. Had it moved a centimeter closer?

"You abandoned them."

"You got that one hoop-backwards," Timea protested. "I jacked into the Matrix to try and save those kids."

"Not them. The others-the ones at the Shelbramat Boarding School. You abandoned them."

Timea frowned. "What are you talking about?"

"They're scared. They're lonely. The Matrix is pretty, but they want their bodies back." She shifted again, as if trying to wriggle free of the straight jacket.

"Huh?"

"The doctors at the boarding school have turned them into the opposite of otaku. When I create my children, I merely improve upon the existing components. I perfect them. But the children at the boarding school-your children-have been reduced to mere components. Their brains are plugged like chips into cyberdecks. And they are imperfect."

"Their brains!" Timea echoed. A chilling premonition of what the Al was about to tell her filled her with dread. "What…" She gulped. "What about their bodies?"

"Gone."

Timea stared at the girl in the straightjacket in horror. Was this true? The data seemed to slot into place as if a bitterly cold icicle had been shoved into her datajack. It linked perfectly all of her previous doubts. She thought back to Professor Halberstam's refusals to let her visit the kids her clinic sent on to the boarding school, the unreturned e-mails she'd sent to the kids who'd been selected from the free clinic…

No. It was too horrifying to be true. "Prove it," she told the AL But although her words were full of bluster and denial, her heart already knew the truth.

The girl's face shifted and became that of a five-year-old girl who had passed through the clinic eight months ago. She had appeared human and was very pretty, but had slightly pointed ears and a covering of soft, downy hair on her arms and legs that suggested she might be some other metatype. A shy, introverted child, Cassie was technically too young to be admitted to the clinic, but her mother had abandoned her on its doorstep as if it were some sort of orphanage.

Timea had wondered why-until she heard the rumors that the mother had contracted the HMHVV virus and in a vampiritic frenzy had drained the blood of her other two children, killing them in the process. The woman, to her credit, had checked her blood lust in time to save a third one. But that didn't make the deaths of the other two any less horrible. And little Cassie had witnessed them.

"Hoi, t-t-teacher," the girl said.

The soft voice and stutter were exactly as Timea remembered.

"How are you, Cassie?"

"I'm scared. It's dark in here."

"Where are you?" Timea yearned to reach out to the child, to hold her in her arms and comfort her, but at the same time knew that was impossible. Any comfort she sent would have to be verbal. Cassie would never experience true physical sensation again.

"I'm in the M-m-matrix. And s-s-somewhere else, too. I'll sh-sh-show you."

Timea felt a lurch, and was suddenly looking out through a small, round tunnel whose end was covered by thick glass. The glass distorted the view, stretching it like a wide-angle vidcam lens. Timea looked down into a room that held a row of glass-walled tanks filled with pink liquid. Indistinct blobs that might have been human brains hung at the center of each tank, and were connected to a battery of cyberdecks by a web of fiber-optic cables. Two men in white lab coats stood nearby, conferring as they adjusted valves that seemed to control the flow of liquid through the tank.

Timea fought down a wave of revulsion. She wondered how her body was reacting, back in the real world. Was bile rising in her throat? She hoped she wouldn't choke on it.

The view shifted and zoomed in on a tank labeled Subject 3.