As we approached the third floor door of Rowena Mayr's flat, I spotted K-mart's hand hovering near his flashlight.

I didn't know what to expect from Rowena Mayr, but it wasn't what appeared when the door finally opened to our knock.

Rowena Mayr was a frazettatoid, member of a highly egocentric group that had splintered off the old Society for Creative Anachronism. Boris had probably been one too.

You didn't see them around much anymore, and I was surprised there were any left unretrofitted. No wonder the Mayrs hadn't felt comfortable in the spartan, utilitarian environment of Aquarius…

Rowena had had her body sculpted to resemble one of the impossible fantasy women from the canvases of her faction's namesake reed-pair artist. Huge cantilevered boobs, a waist so slim it must have involved major organ displacement, and callipygian ass. She wore a tiny metal bra, some faux barbaric jewelry. From a fake gold chain around her waist hung a few wisps of colored silk.

She was such a self-contained, self-immersed, impossible creation that being in the same room with her was like sharing space with an ancient animatronic figure. I tried imagining having her as my mother. It was a major stretch.

"Yes, Officers. How can I help you?"

"It's about your son, Bert. Can we come in?"

"Certainly."

The flat was furnished in High Conan. We sat on embroidered cushions and explained the trouble her son had gotten himself into.

"Well, I feel extremely bad for Bertie. He was always a good boy and showed such promise. Red Sonia knows, I did my best with him! But I don't see how I can help you now."

"He hasn't been in touch with you recently?"

"Not for years."

K– mart stood. "Mind if we have a look around?"

Rowena got hastily to her feet. "Unless you have a warrant, I'm afraid that's out of the question."

Nodding toward a closed door, K-mart said, "What's in there?"

"That's my shrine to Dagon. Very innocent, I assure you. But sacred. Now, if you don't mind, Officers, I'd like to be alone-"

K– mart started to rap a string of antisense as he ambled about the room. "Oh, I was raised Dagonite, but I fell away. Haven't seen a shrine in ages. You don't mind, do you?"

Before Rowena could stop him, K-mart had pulled the door open.

The Blankie was waiting.

It reared up as tall as a man and twice as bulky, a quivering blue wall of cryptoflesh. Unlike what I knew about the small Blankies, this one radiated an ammoniacal, fecal reek.

Bert had obviously been tweaking its parameters a little.

Before K– mart could get his flashlight up, the Blankie fell forward on him, wrapping him in its straitjacket embrace.

Rowena screamed. I had my own flashlight up, but couldn't shoot for fear of piercing the swaddled K-mart.

Something barreled past me so fast and hard it spun me around. When I recovered, I saw our Bulldog tangling with the Blankie, all fangs and talons. It zeroed in on a major ganglion, ripping it out in a bloody mess of dendrites.

The Blankie collapsed like an air-mattress that had sprung a leak.

I went to help a slimed K-mart up. Rowena rushed past me into the Blankie's room, shouting, "Bertie, Bertie, I tried to stop them!"

K– mart seemed shaken, but uninjured. "Tara! I smell like the time I fell into the family outhouse back in Kazakhstan!"

Flashlight in hand, I followed Rowena into the room.

But I needed no weapon to deal with little Berrie.

The fearsome mastermind behind the Blankie murder lay in an oversized Bayer cradle usually used for burn victim treatment, naked except for an oversized cloth diaper. In one lax hand was an Allelix sonic injector. From the utterly wiped look on Bertie's face, I could guess that the injector had been loaded with a probably irreversible dose of Neonate Nine or some other retrogressive synapse-disconnecting trope.

Rowena was kneeling by the cradle, weeping. Together, she and her son resembled some kind of tawdry, modern Pieta.

K– mart came up beside me, shaking his head. "Muy hesomagari."

I thought back to my own days as a mel-head. "But we've all got navels that can get twisted, Kaz. Leastwise, those of us born human."

On our way out, I came on the Bulldog chewing up the evidence. In the heat of the moment, its ancient instincts had overwhelmed its training.

I went to kick it, but changed my mind.

As if blindly obedient to one of the weirder plectic neothomist catastrophe figures, my life seemed to be warping itself around strange attractors, spiraling and darting up and down cusps and caustics, pleats and furrows that led to some unpredictable yet inevitable terminal boundary condition.

And the worst part was-I couldn't tell if on balance I should be scared or glad.

Changes had swarmed through my life as thick as harvest thrips on a cloth-tree during the past few months, enough so as to necessitate a few unscheduled sessions with Doctor Varela, my BP advisor. I had thought I had seen the last of that calm and erudite Behavioral Pragmatist after he had helped me over the rough patch following my departure from the PI biz.

Since joining Boston's branch of the Protein Police, my life had been relatively simple and undemanding, despite the quirks and dangers of my new trade, and I had felt no recent need of beep counseling. But lately all that had changed, leading Doctor Varela to nod and murmur sagely over my condition, consult his snippets, and prescribe a course of

Biomet's Angstaway paired with Sciclone's VivaciTee, as well as a general adrenergic booster. The tropes seemed to be working, although I still felt a little off-parm.

But I was managing to cope well with quite a lot, I thought.

It had all started when the Big Brains in charge of the NU's Internal Recon and Security force (of which the Protein Police was a division) had laid down a couple of new ukases.

First, there were to be no more human-human teams. We were just too understaffed to permit such a luxury to continue and would remain so into the foreseeable future. What with the guaranteed prole-dole, the dwindling numbers of pure-gen, fully enfranchised humans, and the seductions of virtuality, criminality, and a million sects, cults, posses, and sets representing an infinite range of hedonism, nihilism, and every ism on the scale, potential candidates for the force were few and far between. (The same was true, of course, in every branch of the NU adminisphere; without kibes, demons, and cocktails, the whole system would have suffered instant apoptosis.)

So all the old dual-human partnerships were split up. That meant I lost K-mart Saunders, the most agreeable plug I had ever worked with. In his place, I was to choose between a var or a kibe. Well, since the death of my old var Hamster, I couldn't really work too closely with the splices and remain comfortable. That left the kibe.

The Turing Level Four kibes had just gone into general open-access production. (The Level Fives, naturally, were

already up and running, but were reserved exclusively for the use of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and other ruling bodies of the adminisphere, which liked to stay one giant step ahead of the masses they governed. And of course the Level Sixes were not far behind, close to finishing their semi-autonomous evolution.) The Toronto HQ of the Protein Police had just received a month's worth of shipments of Fours from the Bangalore macqui of Segasoft-TogaiMagic, and these had been further distributed across the continent.

The kibe cores themselves looked identical to and had the same dimensions as the old Level Threes, allowing for easy retrofitting: shiny featureless platters about as thick as a stack of a dozen ancient CD's. It was the newly evolved qubitic circuitry inside that raised their functioning to a higher level. As for the chassis that would carry the cores-well, the force's own crada had come up with several new models specifically designed for law enforcement.