"You are making a scene," he says, rudely and abruptly. "What is your name? Tell me truthfully, or you'll spend the night here."

Amber bursts into tears. "My cat's been stolen," she chokes out.

The detective and the cop obviously don't know how to deal with this scene; it's freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. "You wait here," they say, and back out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine.

The implications of her loss – of Aineko's abduction – are sinking in, finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It's hard to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her wisecracking companion and consolation for a year, the rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into soup is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search for backups to synchronize with.

But after an hour, just as she's quieting down into a slough of raw despair, there's a knock – a knock! – at the door. An inquisitive head pops in. "Please to come with us?" It's the female cop with the bad translationware. She takes in Amber's sobbing and tuts under her breath, but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her, she pulls back.

At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. "Please identify," he asks, snipping the string.

Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to synchronize their memories with her. "Is it —" she begins to ask as the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up, curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. "What took you so long?" asks the cat, as she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with seawater.

"If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges," says Amber. "Then I want you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me – round up the usual suspects – and give them root privileges, too. Then we'll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I want guns. Lots of guns."

"That may be difficult," says the ghost. "Many other humans reached halting state long since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine; others were-is lost in DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons."

Amber sighs. "You guys really are media illiterates, aren't you?" She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep's enervation leaching from her muscles. "I'll also need my —" it's on the tip of her tongue: There's something missing. "Hang on. There's something I've forgotten." Something important , she thinks, puzzled. Something that used to be around all the time that would … know? … purr? … help? "Never mind," she hears her lips say. "This other human. I really want her. Non-negotiable. All right?"

"That may be difficult," repeats the ghost. "Entity is looping in a recursively confined universe."

"Eh?" Amber blinks at it. "Would you mind rephrasing that? Or illustrating?"

"Illustration:" The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber's eyes cross as she looks at it. "Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes's demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space, but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact."

"Well, can you get me into that space?" asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it's part and parcel of her life. "Give me some leverage —"

"Risk may attach to this course of action," warns the ghost.

"I don't care," she says irritably. "Just put me there. It's someone I know, isn't it? Send me into her dream, and I'll wake her up, okay?"

"Understood," says the ghost. "Prepare yourself."

Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her clothing has somehow been replaced by sexy lingerie under a nearly transparent robe, and her hair's grown longer by about half a meter. It's all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by —

"Shit," she exclaims. "Who are you?" The young and incredibly, classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then rolls over on her side. She isn't wearing a stitch, she's completely hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of invitation. "Yes?" Amber asks. "What is it?"

The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. "Sorry, that's just not my scene." She backs away into the corridor, unsteady in unaccustomedly high heels. "This is some sort of male fantasy, isn't it? And a dumb adolescent one at that." She looks around again. In one direction, a corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other, it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical destination, but nothing happens. "Looks like I'm going to have to do this the hard way. I wish —" she frowns. She was about to wish that someone else was here, but she can't remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads toward the staircase.

"Up or down?" she asks herself. Up – it seems logical, if you're going to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps carefully, holding the spiraling rail. I wonder who designed this space? she wonders, and what role am I supposed to fit into in their scenario? On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as laughable. Wait till I give him an earful …

There's a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that isn't fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he's built this sex-fantasy castle around himself. I hope it isn't Pierre , she thinks grimly as she pushes the door inward.

The room is bare and floored in wood. There's no furniture, just an open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. Oh shit ! Her eyes widen. Is this what's been inside his head all along?

"I did not summon you," Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. "Go away, tempter. You aren't real."

Amber clears her throat. "Sorry to disappoint you, but you're wrong," she says. "We've got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?"

Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. "That's odd." He undresses her with his gaze. "You look like someone I used to know. You've never done that before."

"For fuck's sake!" Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a moment. "What is this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?"

"I —" Sadeq looks puzzled. "I'm sorry, are you claiming to be real?"

"As real as you are." Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: He doesn't resist as she pulls him toward the doorway.