"You're the first visitor I've ever had." He sounds shocked.

"Listen, come on." She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the floor below. "Do you want to stay here? Really?" She glances back at him. "What is this place?"

"Hell is a perversion of heaven," he says slowly, running the fingers of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. "We'll have to see how real you are —" Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his instep and backhanding him hard.

"You're real!" he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. "Forgive me, please! I had to know —"

"Know what ?" she snarls. "Lay one finger on me again, and I'll leave you here to rot!" She's already spawning the ghost that will signal the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It's a serious threat.

"But I had to – wait. You have free will. You just demonstrated that." He's breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. "I'm sorry , I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not."

"A zombie?" She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight leather suit with a cutaway crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. "You thought I was one of those?"

Sadeq nods. "They've got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly mistook one for —" He shudders convulsively. "Unclean!"

"Unclean." Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. "This isn't really your personal paradise after all, is it?" After a moment she holds out a hand to him. "Come on."

"I'm sorry I thought you were a zombie," he repeats.

"Under the circumstances, I think I forgive you," she says. Then the ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside.

More memories converge on the present moment:

The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that Amber has assembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the interstellar probe her father's business partners are helping her to build. It's also the seat of her court, the leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and counsel.

A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance, heresy, and barratry against a semisentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian space twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the region to its peculiar memeset. A whole bundle of multithreaded countersuits are dragging at her attention, in a counterattack alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent, and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper's intentions.

Right now, Amber isn't home on the Ring to hear the case in person. She's left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her legal system – tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the ass – while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by the Franklin Trust's orphanage ship Ernst Sanger , the Nursery has grown over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three kilometers across. A slow-growing O'Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: Most of the inhabitants of the space station are less than two years old, precocious additions to the Trust's borganism.

There's a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the side of a hill that clings insecurely to the inner edge of a spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that one or another of the borg's special interest minds is testing. Amber, for her part, can't be bothered. She's just had a great meal, she doesn't have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back home is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to come by —

"Do you keep in touch with your father?" asks Monica.

"Mmm." The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. "We e-mail. Sometimes."

"I just wondered." Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl – Yorkshire English overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. "I hear from him, y'know. From time to time. Now that Gianni's retired, he doesn't have much to do down-well anymore. So he was talking about coming out here."

"What? To Perijove?" Amber's eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring and looks round at Monica accusingly.

"Don't worry." Monica sounds vaguely amused: "He wouldn't cramp your style, I think."

"But, out here —" Amber sits up. "Damn," she says, quietly. "What got into him?"

"Middle-aged restlessness, my downwell sibs say." Monica shrugs. "This time Annette didn't stop him. But he hasn't made up his mind to travel yet."

"Good. Then he might not —" Amber stops. "The phrase, 'made up his mind', what exactly do you mean?"

Monica's smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman surrenders. "He's talking about uploading."

"Is that embarrassing or what?" asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly annoyed, but Ang isn't looking her way. So much for friends , Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer relationships —

"He won't do it," Amber predicts. "Dad's burned out."

"He thinks he'll get it back if he optimizes himself for re-entrancy." Monica continues to smile. "I've been telling him it's just what he needs."

"I do not want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie 'Nette and Uncle Gianni. Memo to immigration control: No entry rights for Manfred Macx or the other named individuals without clearance through the Queen's secretary."

"What did he do to get you so uptight?" asks Monica idly.

Amber sighs, and subsides. "Nothing. It's not that I'm ungrateful or anything, but he's just so extropian, it's embarrassing. Like, that was the last century's apocalypse. Y'know?"

"I think he was a really very forward-looking organic," Monica, speaking for the Franklin borg, asserts. Amber looks away. Pierre would get it , she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to Manfred's showing up. Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche without parents looking over his shoulders, although for very different reasons. She focuses on someone male and more or less mature – Nicky, she thinks, though she hasn't seen him for a long time – walking toward the piazza, bare-ass naked and beautifully tanned.

"Parents. What are they good for?" asks Amber, with all the truculence of her seventeen years. "Even if they stay neotenous, they lose flexibility. And there's that long Paleolithic tradition of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I call it."

"How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on your own?" challenges Monica.

"Three. That's when I had my first implants." Amber smiles at the approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: Yes, it's Nicky, and he seems pleased to see her. Life is good , she thinks, idly considering whether or not to tell Pierre.

"Times change," remarks Monica. "Don't write your family off too soon; there might come a time when you want their company."