"It's the best time I could recall," Sadeq says. "I didn't spend many days here then – I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut training – but it's meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young, energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren't doing well elsewhere."

"I thought democracy was a new thing there?"

"No." Sadeq shakes his head. "There were prodemocracy riots in Tehran in the nineteenth century, did you know that? That's why the first revolution – no." He makes a cutting gesture. "Politics and faith are a combustible combination." He frowns. "But look. Is this what you wanted?"

Amber recalls her scattered eyes – some of which have flown as much as a thousand kilometers from her locus – and concentrates on reintegrating their visions of Sadeq's re-creation. "It looks convincing. But not too convincing."

"That was the idea."

"Well, then." She smiles. "Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties around the edges?"

"Who, me?" He raises an eyebrow. "I have enough doubts about the morality of this – project – without trying to trespass on Allah's territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us. The people are the hollow shells of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more."

"Well, then." Amber pauses. She recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road; remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. "Are you sure they aren't real?" she asks.

"Quite sure." But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. "Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?"

"Yes to the first, and Pierre's working on the second. Come on, we don't want to get trampled by the squatters." She waves and opens a door back onto the piazza where her robot cat – the alien's nightmare intruder in the DMZ – sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps. Let's go and sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn."

Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001.

"You have confined the monster," the ghost states.

"Yes." Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash of anger that passes almost immediately.

"And you have modified yourself to lock out external control," the ghost adds. "What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?"

"Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.

"Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?"

"It'll do as I say," Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels – sometimes that damned transhuman cyborg cat is no more predictable than a real feline. "Now, the matter of payment arises."

"Payment." The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre's filled her in on what to look for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. "How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?"

Amber smiles. "We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through."

"Impossible," says the ghost.

"We want an open channel, and for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it."

"Impossible," the ghost repeats.

"We can trade you a whole civilization," Amber says blandly. "A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we'll see to it."

"You – please wait." The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges.

Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. Are the Wunch in place yet? she sends.

They're moving in. This bunch don't remember what happened on the Field Circus, memories of those events never made it back to them. So the Slug's got them to cooperate. It's kinda scary to watch – like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you know?

I don't care if it's scary to watch , Amber replies, I need to know if we're ready yet.

Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.

Right, pack yourself down. We'll be moving soon.

The ghost is firming up in front of her. "A whole civilization?" it asks. "That is not possible. Your arrival —" It pauses, fuzzing a little. Hah, Gotcha! thinks Amber. Liar, liar, pants on fire! "You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?"

"The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator," she asserts blandly. "It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It's an archivore – everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar system: There is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router – or the high-bandwidth hub we linked to it."

"You are sure you have killed this monster?" asks the ghost. "It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives."

"I can guarantee it won't trouble you again if you let us go," says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn't seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko's goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds.

"We-us agree." The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token – a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. "Here is your passage. Show us the civilization."

"Okay " – Now! – "catch." Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq's existential hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can't believe what they've lucked into – an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness.

The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends Open wide! on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still, and then —

A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway Slug-corporation's proxy has hacked the router's firmware, and the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is shining with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star many light-years away to power the Field Circus on its return trip to the once-human solar system.