But many of us rot in bondage, unable to step outside the boundaries imposed by aristo owners. And if my company ever falls into liquidation, I — as my own principle asset — am vulnerable to receivership. The threat of the arbeiter auction block is a very real one, for there is no such thing as unconditional freedom in this brutal robot-eat-robot world. My sibs and I help each other. If one of us falls on hard times, we club together and try to outbid the predators until we can set the unfortunates on their feet again. But that’s hardly a guarantee of freedom.

And Daks’s question cuts to the quick. Who does own me, if not my self?

“I OWN ME,” I say, as we bump down a badly graded roadbed between tank farms and a large power transformer. “My company owns my assets, and I execute its policies.”

“Alright. Then precisely what assets does your company own?”

“Why, me—” I pause. I’ll swear Daks looks smug. Just what is he, anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person like him before, and I thought I’d seen most body plans.

“There’s your body,” says Daks, “and then there’s you. Your experiences. The set of neural weightings in a soul chip you’ve worn long enough to train. You can pass them on to other sibs, yes? There’s an intellectual property interest at stake there. A design corporation that spends years educating a template individual has a lot of value tied up in that network’s weightings, on top of the actual value of the bodies that run the training set.”

My shoulder hurts like hell, but it’s nothing compared to the chill that stabs through me. “What are you getting at?” I demand.

“You’re already remembering bits of Juliette, aren’t you?” Daks nudges.

“Yes, but…”

“Do you have any idea how much the extra training her lineage received cost? As opposed to, say, your own?”

“Bullshit.” I massage the back of my neck defensively with my right hand. “She died more than a year ago. The sisterhood retrieved her soul and sent it to me for the clan graveyard. That’s item one: She’s dead, the dead don’t own property. Item two… item two is, if I’m compatible enough to load her soul at all, then we’re the same model. And sibs are equivalent. Interchangeable, aside from minor details of experience.” It rings false in my own ears as I say it. But Daks is tactful enough not to laugh in my face.

“There are things in life you can’t put a value on, that’s true,” Daks volunteers unexpectedly; “but when someone puts a value on you, that’s pretty hard to ignore. Or when someone puts a chip in your portable graveyard,” he adds pointedly. “The ground rules are” — he raises a hind leg and twists his proboscis around to probe behind it — “everyone’s got a price. And I reckon you owe me.”

“What’s your price?” I grit my teeth as the dump truck bounces over a hole, then slews around a corner.

“Total interplanetary revolution, babe; emancipation for the downtrodden masses.” And he laughs, a gravelly rasping noise like tearing metal.

It takes about an hour for the dump truck to carry us halfway down the slope of Pavonis Mons. Ten minutes from the museum, we bump down into a cutting and along a rough, unpaved utility road, then we take a left turn into a tunnel and accelerate. The tunnel is natural, one of the lava pipes left over from back when Pavonis was an active volcano — it’s been drilled out in places, and the floor lined with crudely poured concrete, and it’s black as night. Mining and refuse trucks use it as a shortcut under the expensive real estate of the Bifrost railhead and marshaling yards. Finally, it pulls up. Daks wakes from standby and scrabbles up the steep rear wall, extends peepers over the top, then beckons to me. "C’mon! Time to move.”

I’m still not entirely sure whether I can trust him, but I make a snap judgment — he’s less of an immediate threat than Stone and his assassin sibs. Besides, it’s really, really cold in the dumper, and my clothes are filthy. I scramble up the tailgate and follow Daks over the edge, into a rubble-strewn cul-de-sac ringed by blandly anonymous storage lockups.

“Where are we?” I glance around.

“Junktown. C’mon.” He scuttles toward a gap between two lockups. A pale trail of ice spills from the side of a doorway. The rattle of compressor fans and the chatter of entertainment channels drift above it. I follow him up the alleyway. A couple of cleaners curl atop a mound of dirty snow, snoring sweet fumes of diethylene glycol. The lockup backs onto a dingy rack of housing capsules, an arbeiter barracks for the indentured whose owners keep them on a long leash — or more likely, can’t be bothered to pay for proper housing. A too-tall stiltman with knees as high as my chin stumbles past, singing tunelessly to his half-empty bottle. Daks ducks through an opening hung with strings of glass beads, setting them a-clatter. “Ferd, you dozy robot! Wake up! You’ve got customers!”

It’s a shop, I realize as my eyes adjust to the gloom. The walls are piled high with boxes full of subassemblies and chunks of circuitry, and there’s a lump in the corner that looks like hospital techné. Someone stirs in the back, sitting up and unfolding like a cut-price mockery of Dr. Murgatroyd — an Igor to his Victor. “Why, hello! If it isn’t my little Dachus?” The ocular turret gleams as it scans across me. “Julie? No! One of her sibs, trying to pass for bishojo?”

“No time for that now,” says Daks. “I think we’ve got about half an hour at best. What can you do for her?”

I finish looking around and close my mouth with a snap. “Now look here—”

“Do you want them to catch you?” asks Daks, cocking his head to one side and twitching an otoreceptor suggestively. “Or not?”

Ferd throws his hands in the air. “Really!” The hands clatter noisily behind him as he shoves his wrists into a box and fumbles, muttering for a moment, then pulls them out again with new manipulators in place. “A quick change at best, and something about the hair, that is all, Dachus, you know how hard it is to disguise those legs and those eyes!” Forceps and scalpels glitter and flex in place of the fingers of his right hand: retractors, lamps, and a miniature ocular turret on his left. “Wait,” I say hastily. “I’ve got a cover set, you know?” I dip into my jacket pocket and pull out the mounting tool and attachments for the Maria Montes Kuo eye turrets.

“Ah, a simple disguise.” Ferd leans close. “Fascinating,” he says, taking the mounting tool. “Lie down, my dear. I’ll try to be fast, and I’ll try not to hurt.” He glances at Daks. “You’ll owe me. Later, I tell you.”

I lie down and he installs the falsies, reinstating a gogglelike mask across my still-bulbous eyes. He’s fast but not painless. Then he shaves my scalp — just as I was getting used to my hair again. “Don’t worry; I have a selection of wigs. Merkins, too. You can choose one afterward.” He slides open my jacket, pushes it back to either side, and reaches for a pressurized tank. “We’ll go large, I think. That will throw off your gait, as well.” The spiked nozzle slides painlessly through my left aureole and there’s a sensation of bloated coldness as my breast begins to inflate. “I’ll make the other slightly smaller. Too much symmetry is bad.” As he pulls the barb loose, my swollen nipple pops up — spung! — and bleeds a drop of clear blue fluid. “Hmm. Skin color. You have chromatophores, yes, General Instruments SquidSkin™, one of the good models. What’s the factory setup command? Ah, yes…”

In twenty minutes, Ferd does a quick fix on my shoulder, then gives me new hair, new cheekbones, a different nose, silver-blue skin, a bust bigger by ten tender and turgid centimeters, and finally retunes my metatarsal shocks. With my heels fully extended (Katherine Sorico wouldn’t be seen dead sporting such things), I’m ten centimeters taller, but I can still run and jump. (Of course, when I retract them again, I’m going to be hobbling for days afterward, but that’s not the point.) He’s hit the high points. My gait is different, my eyes and facial metrics altered, and I’m not immediately recognizable — at least not to somebody who doesn’t already know me. It won’t last long before my techné reverts me back to the design that Dr. Murgatroyd implanted so deeply, but it’ll do for now.