“SBU?”

Yamazaki had his notebook out, lightpen poised. Laney found that he didn’t mind. It made the man look so much more comfortable. “Strategic Business Unit,” he said. “A small conference room. Slitscan’s post office.”

“Post office?”

“California plan. People don’t have their own desks. Check a computer and a phone out of the Cage when you come in. Hotdesk it if you need more peripherals. The SBUs are for meetings, but it’s hard to get one when you need it. Virtual meetings are a big thing there, better for sensitive topics. You get a locker to keep your personal stuff in. You don’t want them to see any printouts. And they hate Post-its.”

“Why?”

“Because you might’ve written something down from the in-house net, and it might get out. That notebook of yours would never have been allowed out of the Cage. If there was no paper, they had a record of every call, every image called up, every keystroke.”

Blackwell nodded now, his stubbled dome catching the red of Amos’s inner-tube lips. “Security.”

“And you were successful, Mr. Laney?” Yamazaki asked. “You found the… nodal points?”

Shut up now,” the woman in 23E said, and Chia hadn’t said anything at all. “Sister’s going to tell you a story.”

Chia looked up from the seatback screen, where she’d been working her way through the eleventh level of a lobotomized airline version of Skull Wars. The blond was looking straight ahead, not at Chia. Her screen was down so that she could use the back of it for a tray, and she’d finished another glass of the iced tomato juice she kept paying the flight attendant to bring her. They came, for some reason, with squared-off pieces of celery stuck up in them, like a straw or stir-stick, but the blond didn’t seem to want these. She’d stacked five of them in a square on the tray, the way a kid might build the walls of a little house, or a corral for toy animals.

Chia looked down at her thumbs on the disposable Air Magellan touchpad. Back up at the mascaraed eyes. Looking at her now.

“There’s a place where it’s always light,” the woman said. “Bright, everywhere. No place dark. Bright like a mist, like something falling, always, every second. All the colors of it. Towers you can’t see the top of, and the light falling. Down below, they pile up bars. Bars and strip clubs and discos. Stacked up like shoe boxes, one on top of the other. And no matter how far you worm your way in, no matter how many stairs you climb, how many elevators you ride, no matter how small a room you finally get to, the light still finds you. It’s a light that blows in under the door, like powder. Fine, so fine. Blows in under your eyelids, if you find a way to get to sleep. But you don’t wantto sleep there. Not in Shinjuku. Do you?”

Chia was suddenly aware of the sheer physical mass of the plane, of the terrible unlikeliness of its passage through space, of its airframe vibrating through frozen night somewhere above the sea, off the coast of Alaska now—impossible but true. “No,” Chia heard herself say, as Skull Wars, noting her inattention, dumped her back a level.

“No,” the woman agreed, “you don’t. I know. But they make you. They make you. At the center of the world.” And then she put her head back, closed her eyes, and began to snore.

Chia exited Skull Wars and tucked the touchpad into the seat-back pocket. She felt like screaming. What had thatbeen about?

The attendant came by, scooped up the corral of celery sticks in a napkin, took the woman’s glass, wiped the tray, and snapped it up into position in the seatback.

“My bag?” Chia said. “In the bin?” She pointed.

He opened the hatch above her, pulled out her bag, and lowered it into her lap.

“How do you undo these?” She touched the loops of tough red jelly that held the Zip-tabs together.

He took a small black tool from a black holster on his belt. It looked like something she’d seen a vet use to trim a dog’s nails. He held his other hand cupped, to catch the little balls the loops became when he snipped them with the tool.

“Okay to run this?” She pulled a zip and showed him her Sandbenders, stuffed in between four pairs of rolled-up tights.

“You can’t port back here; only in business or first,” he said. “But you can access what you’ve got. Cable to the seatback display, if you want.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Got gogs.” He moved on.

The blond’s snore faltered in mid-buzz as they jolted over a pocket of turbulence. Chia dug her glasses and tip-sets from their nests of clean underwear, putting them beside her, between her hip and the armrest. She pulled the Sandbenders out, zipped the bag shut, and used her free hand and both feet to wedge the bag under the seat in front of her. She wanted out of here so bad.

With the Sandbenders across her thighs, she thumbed a battery check. Eight hours on miser mode, if she was lucky. But right now she didn’t care. She uncoiled the lead from around the bridge of her glasses and jacked it. The tip-sets were tangled, like they always were. Take your time, she told herself. A torn sensor-band and she’d be here all night with an Ashleigh Modine Carter clone. Little silver thimbles, flexy framework fingers; easy did it… Plug for each one. Jack and jack…

The blond said something in her sleep. If sleep was what you called it.

Chia picked up her glasses, slid them on, and hit big red.

–My ass outof here.

And it was.

There on the edge of her bed, looking at the Lo Rez Skyline poster. Until Lo noticed. He stroked his half-grown mustache and grinned at her.

“Hey, Chia.”

“Hey.” Experience kept it subvocal, for privacy’s sake.

“What’s up, girl?”

“I’m on an airplane. I’m on my way to Japan.”

“Japan? Kicky. You do our Budokan disk?”

“I don’t feel like talking, Lo.” Not to a software agent, anyway, sweet as he might be.

“Easy.” He shot her that catlike grin, his eyes wrinkling at the corners, and became a still image. Chia looked around, feeling disappointed. Things weren’t quite the right size, somehow, or maybe she should’ve used those fractal packets that messed it all up a little, put dust in the corners and smudges around the light switch. Zona Rosa swore by them. When she was home, Chia liked it that the construct was cleaner than her room ever was. Now it made her homesick; made her miss the real thing.

She gestured for the living room, phasing past what would’ve been the door to her mother’s bedroom. She’d barely wireframed it, here, and there was no there there, no interiority. The living room had its sketchy angles as well, and furniture she’d imported from a Playmobil system that predated her Sandbenders. Wonkily bitmapped fish swam monotonously around in a glass coffee table she’d built when she was nine. The trees through the front window were older still: perfectly cylindrical Crayola-brown trunks, each supporting an acid-green cotton ball of undifferentiated foliage. If she looked at these long enough, the Mumphalumphagus would appear outside, wanting to play, so she didn’t.

She positioned herself on the Playmobil couch and looked at the programs scattered across the top of the coffee table. The Sandbenders system software looked like an old-fashioned canvas water bag, a sort of canteen (she’d had to consult What Things Are, her icon dictionary, to figure that out). It was worn and spectacularly organic, with tiny beads of water bulging through the tight weave of fabric. If you got in super close you saw things reflected in the individual droplets: circuitry that was like beadwork or the skin on a lizard’s throat, a long empty beach under a gray sky, mountains in the rain, creek water over different-colored stones. She loved Sandbenders; they were the best. THE SANDBENDERS, OREGON, was screened faintly across the sweating canvas, as though it had almost faded away under a desert sun. SYSTEM 5.9. (She had all the upgrades, to 6.3. People said 6.4 was buggy.)