“My dear, where have you been?” he implores, as I breeze past the front desk, leaving Blunt to park himself beside the main entrance like a bizarre green lawn ornament. “I’ve been so worried!”

“I’ve got myself a job, Paris!” I lean forward and plant a kiss on his forehead. “And I’ll be back, I promise. But I’ve got to run an errand first, and it’ll take me out of town for some time.”

“A job?” His expression brightens. “You’ll be back?”

If there’s anyone on this dustball I’d want to see again, it would be my yummy new employer — but I don’t have to tell him that. Instead, I make a quick judgment call. “What can you tell me about the Jeeves Corporation?”

“Reliable,” he says at once. “Discreet. Are they—” He blinks at me in surprise. “You don’t say. How remarkable!”

“What is?” I ask.

“You’re working for Jeeves? Well, well.” He gives a little sigh. “How predictable. Jeeves always gets the girl. I expect you’ll be wanting to check out?”

“I need to pick up my things,” I remind him. “And settle up the bill.” I give him a warning look. Jeeves has advanced me enough to cover it. Much as there is to commend Paris to me — and he is a considerate, friendly lover — I do not want to be in his debt.

“But Freya…!” He pauses. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” I brush a finger lightly under his chin, for a moment. Then smile. “I’ll be back. Can you wait?”

His mood visibly brightens. “Oh yes. And you won’t need to worry about vermin next time you stay.”

“You found them?”

“Not me, personally, no, I didn’t find them.” He’s so smug it’s ridiculous. “But my bellboys managed to track them down. And I gather they’re going to have a very chilly night.”

“Chilly—”

“Yes, they’re bound for the darkside now.” Where the icicle-bright stars come out and the ground cools down, and the only things that move are the migratory exopods of the renegades who have fled the Forbidden Cities of the Kuiper Belt for the one place in the solar system that’s even colder than the backside of Pluto.

I shiver. “Thank you, Paris.”

“For you, my dear? Anytime.”

MOST PEOPLE HAVE a mild phobia of nanoscale replicators. From our earliest days we’ve heard horror stories about pink and green goo, unconstrained mutation engines that can overrun a factory or city in a matter of weeks.

And I suppose it’s understandable that, without the guidance of our Creators, certain people who were entrusted with maintaining specific programs let them drop. But how they missed the onset of a runaway greenhouse effect — well, it was the scandal of the century! At first there was denial, and then there were recriminations, followed by assertions aplenty that it signified nothing. But when the Gulf of Mexico came to a rolling boil, heads rolled in their turn.

Since that fateful year, the servants of the various governments of Earth — running on autopilot, inquorate, for our kind are not voters within any of the legal codes our Creators bequeathed to us, and can only maintain a tenuous, legally recognized half-life as limited-liability corporations — the government agencies have devoted their efforts to rebuilding the biosphere. They talk of eventually reintroducing our Creators, building new ones from scratch if necessary. However…it’s not that easy.

Pink goo, green goo: ribonucleotide-based self-replicating nanomachines, respectively powered by subassemblies of mitochondria and chloroplasts; these are the things of which the biosphere was built. (The biosphere was the maintenance environment within which my Dead Love’s kind thrived.) We have, of course, the algorithms and initialization data for those DNA and RNA machines, and we even have a database for the strange protein assemblies that the ribonucleotide sequences control.

One might think that this stuff is just water-soluble nanomachinery, and it should be easy enough to build one of our progenitors from these blueprints. But apparently there are huge problems with this approach. It’s rather difficult to build a test organism — I believe the standard one is called a mouse — when all you have to work with are the most primitive forms of replicator. DNA programs don’t run on mechanocytes or sensibly designed assembler platforms; they run on much smaller, much more complex machines called eukaryotic cells. It’s terribly hard to make a eukaryotic cell from scratch; the traditional technique is to take an already-working one and modify it, then induce replication and specialization. But there are no surviving eukaryotic organisms left to work with.

They didn’t take terribly well to being boiled.

Expeditions were dispatched, to Lunograd (long since evacuated by the last of the Creators) and to the Martian Expeditionary Outpost (ditto), in a desperate search for undenatured cell samples — but they met with scant success. On Luna, everything had been thoroughly irradiated by cosmic rays; and on Mars, the pervasive superoxides in the soil had massacred the precious peptide chains beyond hope of repair. Not only had our Creators all died — so had the infrastructure they relied on!

Then a more subtle threat emerged. Different kinds of pink goo infest different worlds. Replicators are tenacious. There are white cellular striae in the abyssal oceans of Europa, and strange, matted sheets of self-propagating polymer on the floodplains of Titan. There are reports of something unspeakably weird, with a taste for fullerene cables, from one of the extrasolar colonies. What if alien life, accidentally transplanted to Earth in the absence of the Creators, were to gain a toe (or tentacle) hold? With interplanetary commerce increasing by the year, the custodians of Earth’s crippled biosphere made it a priority to protect their planet from contamination by alien replicators. After all, Earth’s dead biosphere is now little more than a nutrient tank for any stray replicator that might find its way there — and if Earth were to be corrupted by alien life, what then would be the prospects for rebuilding humanity?

Hence the Pink Police, more formally known as the Replication Suppression Agency. And the Jeeves Corporation’s little problem should now be clear…

FREYA NAKAMICHI-47 CHECKS out of the Cinnabar Paris and vanishes from the squares of the city. She never resurfaces. Even her mail goes unanswered. Indeed, a curious onlooker might regard her disappearance as highly suspicious.

In point of fact, I am quartered in the precincts of a secure apartment complex hollowed out of the decaying guts of a certain ailing business tower on the edge of the commercial district. I am there to be outfitted and trained for my upcoming mission. The lack of word from Emma (or Victor, for that matter) drives me to distraction — but Jeeves says I can’t break cover at this point. I extract a promise from him to suborn my postal proxy and forward my mail, and force myself to leave it in his capable hands.

Out with my old style; in with a new one. My frizz of fresh red hair has to come off again, to be replaced with a new crop of luxurious blond strands. (My eyebrows and other pilosynthetic follicles need plucking and reprogramming to match, too. Ow.) Jeeves’s tame surgical engineer, Dr. Knox, comes to visit. When he leaves a couple of days later, my eyes are sapphire blue and two sizes too big, my belly aches, my button-nose is upturned, and my ears come to distinctive, delicate points. I practice deporting myself like an aristo. “Bloody elves,” grumps Oscar, the site security supervisor, when he thinks I can’t hear him. He’s half-joking, of course. He knows I’m no aristo, chibi or bishojo. But it doesn’t leave me feeling any less sensitive.