The first thing she did was work on enhancing the face of the subject. She couldn't improve it much, but brought enough clarity to the image to be certain it was a dark-haired and fairly dark-skinned boy. She stared at it stupidly for a moment, afraid to let herself believe what seemed obvious.

Could that be Dread? But he looks about thirteen. Why would Jongleur have footage of him when he was thirteen? What possible significance would it have?

She went back to work in earnest, struggling with the unfamiliar gear to get better resolution, wishing she knew more about this kind of work. She managed to alter the contrast enough to bring the cheekbone and jaw out from the fait of straight black hair and felt her pulse speed—the face certainly had something of Dread's shape to it. But no matter how much she tried, she could not make the image any clearer, which was odd because she could improve things like the edge of the table or the subject's hands into a grainy but precise image.

Thwarted, but inwardly convinced it was him, she next began to work on the object lying on the table between his hands, a dark lozenge about ten by five centimeters. When she realized that it wasn't a familiar object and stopped trying to see it that way, she was finally able to bring it into better focus. It was some kind of timer with a digital readout, like an oblong watch with no strap. As she ran the footage backward and forward she began to make out the pattern of the numbers, although she confused herself several times before she finally realized that halfway through the experiment or test the numbers on the readout suddenly began to run backward.

Dulcie shook her head. A teenage Dread holding a timer that ticked forward in the standard manner, then switched and began running the numbers backward? What the hell kind of experiment was that? And why would Jongleur have stashed it in this very secret equivalent of a personnel file?

She reviewed the experiment footage over and over, and although she had become so certain that the figure was Dread she could no longer imagine it otherwise, she could make no other sense of it. It was only when she ran the sequence back to its very beginning for a last look that she realized she hadn't paid any attention to the flash of white at the start, assuming it was just a blank caused by bad data. When she stopped and slowed it she saw that it was actually something white passing in front of the camera. Certain that it would prove to be only someone's lab coat, or perhaps the vastly distorted hand of the person filming the test as they adjusted the lens, she nevertheless began to play with it.

It was a card, she discovered after many minutes fiddling with the resolution—perhaps something with the experiment number marked on it. The beginning of the footage was gone, so it was only present for an instant before it was whipped away again, but she could see faint gray marks that she felt sure were writing. She started the round of enhancements all over again, determined to make the smudges legible.

Half an hour later the machine came up with the fifth and best iteration. The card was catching light from an overhead fluorescent, a glare which all but obliterated the camera's ability to see what was on it, but gear meant to recognize facial features from low-Earth orbit had finally turned the marks into recognizable words:

DR. CHAVEN—PROCEDURE #12831—WULGARU, JOHN

Dulcie suddenly had an intense sensation of being watched, of naked vulnerability. She looked up in a panic, certain that Dread had crept up behind her again, but her bedroom was empty, the door bolted. She closed her pad and walked quietly out into the hallway to make certain Dread was still prisoned in his whispering sarcophagus.

John Wulgaru, she thought when she got back. Her hands were shaking. Is that his name, then? Am I the only person who knows that? Or the only person still alive?

She dismissed such melodrama as the product of her nervousness. The important thing was, she had cracked it. Who else could have pulled it off? Damn few.

The roller coaster was now heading back upward. Dulcie was eager to do something, anything, with this hard-won bit of knowledge. She called up Dread's locked room, but the hidden storage did not respond to the name in any combination. Only slightly disappointed, she closed the connection. Even if his real name was almost completely unknown, Dread would probably not use it as a password, especially for a file which might well contain incriminating evidence about his professional life. But it was a first step—getting to know the system's owner was the best key to cracking it, and now she knew something important about Dread.

Dulcie paused for a moment to wonder why Jongleur had so effectively booby-trapped his information about Dread, but had left the Ushabti file, which was apparently concerned with something far larger and more important, the transfer of his estate, without similar protection. Perhaps because Jongleur knew there could be no good reason for anyone other than himself to be looking at the Dread information, she guessed, but the other file might wind up passing through the hands of attorneys, company officers, and various other third parties.

She drummed her fingers, anxious to do something else. At the very least, she could find out what records if any could be pulled up using her employer's newly-discovered name. She doubted there would be much of interest floating around, but as a veteran of the information wars she knew it was hard to completely eradicate anything from the vast worldwide matrix.

She set her gear on a shielded search for "Wulgaru," then went to lie down, stare at the ceiling, and grind her teeth.

As she had guessed, the search brought up little except a few bits here and there having to do with an Aboriginal myth. The longest and most complete version, by two people named Kuertner and Jigalong, came from an academic journal of folklore. It was a disturbing little story, strangely open-ended. Although it told her nothing useful about her employer, the hours she spent afterward waiting for sleep, mind already enflamed with all she had learned and done and risked that day, were troubled by the idea of a remorseless wooden man with stones for eyes.

Dread brought the music up louder as the chorus moaned its way up and down the twelve-tone scale, then fragmented into separate sharp cries like a little shower of suffering raindrops. He was in his own simulation, floating in his airy white house, surrounded by clear Outback light. He opened a view-window to check on his employee again, but she was sleeping now. He had spent much of the last several hours observing her as she fretted her way through whatever she was working on, wondering what he should do about The Dulcie Problem. A keen student of humanity in the same way that an exterminator makes it his work to understand class Insecta, Dread had not failed to notice the change in her feelings about him. Somehow, while he had been busy with his various experiments on me network, the fish had wriggled off the hook. Which meant she could no longer be trusted.

So maybe our Ms. Anwin's finally outlived her usefulness.

He pondered, bathing in the music, the air, the sparklingly clean desert light. God knew, he deserved a bit of a holiday. Maybe he should give her a day or two more to finish the work on Jongleur's files, then resolve the matter.

But could he afford to terminate Dulcie now? He still had many questions. Although his interest in the Grail network had begun to flag a little, he would find it hard to achieve his real world plans by himself without the network's powerful operating system, and here he was discovering real problems. His control over the basic functions of the network was nearly complete, but the apparently sentient part of the operating system was no longer responding quite so dramatically to the pain stimuli, as though the system had either learned to block the worst of it . . . or perhaps was just wearing down.