Author: Robin Sloan
Date: 2009-07-15 13:18:07+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Mystery; Fantasy
Description: ANNABEL SCHEME is a detective story set in an alternate San Francisco where the digital and the occult live side-by-side. It's a short read, perfect for people who like Sherlock Holmes, Douglas Adams, ghosts and/or the internet. In Scheme's San Francisco, an indie rocker's new tracks are climbing the charts, even though the rocker herself is long dead. A devout gamer has gone missing, and the only trace of him that remains is inside his favorite game, the blockbuster MMORPG called World of Jesus. And the richest man in the city, the inventor of the search engine called Grail, might just have m
Publisher: robinsloan

We, the undersigned, entrust this record to many worlds. We need your help. You are now a member of

The Committee to Find and Rescue
Annabel Scheme

Nelson Beck
Co-Founder, Counsel

Octav Erdos
Co-Founder, Treasurer

Hugin Nineteen
Co-Founder, Secretary

ZEROTH AVENUE

Where the skinny green strip of the Panhandle rolled into the basin of Golden Gate Park, there was a row of old Edwardians on a short stub of a street called Zeroth Avenue. Their shapes were all the same, each with jutting oriels and a deep-set doorway, like eyes and a mouth, but each was painted with a different palette: blue and white; green and gold; brown and slightly-darker-brown.

The house on the corner was monochrome and asymmetrical, every slat and shingle a different shade of gray. From across the street it looked like static.

The sign on the front door said

ANNABEL SCHEME
INVESTIGATOR, DIGITAL & OCCULT

but I didn’t know which part of the business our visitor had come for. It was my first case with Scheme; I was hoping for occult.

Inside, the blinds were tilted down against the sun. Our visitor was young, late twenties, with dark freckles and smudges of makeup around his eyes. He was wearing a black hoodie and flip-flops, sitting up straight in Scheme’s blue chair, reserved for clients.

His name was Ryan Kelly. He had a bruise spreading on his cheek.

“They’re everywhere,” Ryan Kelly was saying. “They’ve got my voice on them. Singing stuff I never sang.”

Scheme sat across from him at her narrow desk piled high with paper. Her hair was down in coppery curls around her shoulders, and she looked tired.

“You’re a professional musician,” she said.

“I’m in a band,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “We played a show last night.”

“How did it go?”

“It sucked.”

His band is called Moon Suicide, I whispered to Scheme. I figured a detective’s assistant was always whispering tips in her ear. Popular, but not that popular.

“Is it like a hacker?” Ryan asked. “It’s bullshit.”

Scheme nodded. “Sounds like a musical imposter. I think you need a copyright lawyer, not a detective. I know someone…”

“I found you on Grail,” Ryan said. Emphasis on you.

“You must have been searching for something strange.”

He looked down at his flip-flops. “There’s another voice on the tracks.”

Scheme was silent. Waiting.

“I used to be in a different band,” Ryan said. “Six years ago. It was just the two of us. Her name was Pam Prior. She was my girlfriend. It’s her voice, too.”

“What does she think of this?”

“She’s dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Scheme said. “So these are old recordings. Somebody got their hands on them.”

Ryan shook his head. “The lyrics are about stuff that happened after she died. All the crazy shit in Fog City.”

He’s right. I found the tracks—the band is called Pam-n-Ryan—and they’re very topical. They’re featured on the biggest music filter. The Listener.

“People think it’s some sick publicity stunt,” Ryan said. He was still looking down at the floor, and his face was bright red. “Like one of those commercials where they bring Amitabh Bachchan back to life to sell toothpaste.” He touched his cheek. “Some asshole threw a beer at me. And he yelled”—he paused—“Pam’s dead.”

But then he looked up, and his voice cracked, and it became a question. “Is she dead?”

Aha: occult.

“She’s dead,” Scheme said, sharp and definite. Then, softer: “But sometimes it’s a little more complicated than that.”

The expression on Ryan’s face was a mutant hybrid of hope and horror. His mouth hung open a little bit.

“Listen. It’s probably some Estonian knockoff artists,” Scheme said. “Ninety-nine percent chance it’s Estonians.”

“Well I wanna know,” Ryan said. His color was returning to normal. “Either way. I wanna know.”

Scheme stood and nodded. “I’ll take your case,” she said.

Ryan stood, too, and she led him through to the front of the office.

“Let me assure you: if anyone can figure this out, it’s me and Hu.”

Ryan eyes lingered on the shelves in the front room; they were stacked with books, folders, vials, and totems.

“Hu?” he said. “Who’s, uh. Hu.”

“He’s my intern,” Scheme said, and smiled. “We’ll start our investigation immediately.”

Ryan nodded. “Thanks. Really, thanks.” He leaned in to hug her; Scheme’s eyes widened in surprise, and she grimaced a little. Then he was out the door.

Maybe you should not tell people about me, I said, if you’re just going to tell them I’m an intern.

Scheme was smiling again. She tugged on a light gray coat, drew a black hair-tie from one of its pockets—deep pockets—and pulled her hair up into a bright red knot. “This is going to be a good case, Hu. You’re going to learn a lot.”

Are we going to the cemetery? To look for fresh earth above Pam Prior’s grave?

“Uh. No,” she said. She was back at her desk now, digging in the heaps of paper, tossing folders and envelopes to the floor. “And don’t sound so excited. We are going to a place where things are born”—she lifted a set of keys triumphantly from the wreckage—“not to where they die.”

She clicked the lights off as she stepped lightly through the front room. Some of the vials still glowed in the shadows. On the front steps, she pulled the door shut and wiped a cuff across the sign.

Scheme, do you think it might actually be Pam Prior?

She jogged across the street to her car, a bright red Tata hatch-back with a wide dent in the side panel. The sun was shining down bright and clear from directly overhead, and everything was over-exposed in my camera-eyes.

“Let me put it this way,” Scheme said. She reached into one of her pockets and pulled out a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses. “There’s really only a seventy-five percent chance it’s Estonians.”

LOCUST GROVE

I recorded everything. Seventy-two hours of video from that moment forward, captured through a dozen different lenses, all the feeds overlapping. Thousands of notes, stored in dozens of databases. But I won’t show all that to you, because I know it wouldn’t make any sense. Instead, I’ll just tell the story.

But first, let me introduce myself.

My given name is hugin-19.lg.grailgrid.net, but she always just called me Hu. My body is a skinny gray box—think extra-large pizza—stacked up in a wide low room in Locust Grove, Oregon.

For most of my life, I was one of 100,000 servers in Grail’s data center here on the banks of the Hood River. Most of the servers in my cluster worked on Grail search; a few worked on Grail maps and Grail-mail. My job was different: I was a Grail cop. I watched the others for malfunctions or malfeasance and told my boss, an administrator named Ewan who lived in Dublin, if anything went wrong. Otherwise, I just took notes.

The cluster was quiet. I did my job, and with my spare cycles, I read Open Britannica articles and blog posts about the world outside. Sometimes I’d chat with Ewan.

Then the Hood River dried up, and kilowatt-hours got two-tenths of a cent more expensive in Locust Grove, so Grail moved the cluster to Canada.

A Russian company bought the data center and auctioned off the servers. Now, you might wonder: who buys an old server in an abandoned data center when you can just use Grail’s latest for free?

Easy: scammers, spammers, gangsters and spooks.

Also, a woman named Annabel Scheme, none of the above.

It was 2:12 and 26 milliseconds on a Tuesday afternoon when she logged in and started to download a fresh copy of some no-name open-source operating system. I thought this was a mistake, obviously, so I said:

Excuse me.

I don’t think she expected anyone to be here. That’s reasonable, because no one was supposed to be here; Grail wiped the rest of the servers clean when they moved the cluster. I watched them go, one by one. But Ewan skipped me.

Why? Because I’m not a normal server. I knew it. Ewan knew it.

Annabel Scheme would find out. And so will you.

Excuse me, I said, in tiny letters on her screen. If you’re looking for a server, I’m perfectly capable. What are your requirements?

Scheme smiled (you can tell when people are smiling and typing; it’s in the rhythm of the keys) and she said:

“I need an assistant.”

THE BLACK DANUBE

Annabel Scheme wore surveillance earrings. Each one was a glinting grape-cluster of wide-angle lenses and tiny microphones, and, dangling one from each ear, they captured nearly the full sphere of the world. They allowed me to perch on Scheme’s shoulders and see approximately through her eyes—and through eyes in the back of her head. The only thing in the world I couldn’t see was Scheme’s face, unless there was a reflection—a pane of glass, perhaps, or a rear-view mirror.

We were humming along Fell Street with the windows rolled down and a scrim of peeling trees flashing past on the left. Scheme breathed in deep through her nose.

“Smells like eucalyptus.”

The new Pam-n-Ryan tracks were everywhere on the internet, but they all sprung from the same source: a music filter called The Listener. I was piping one of them through the Tata’s tinny stereo.

Pam Prior was singing about love and quantum physics.

They really do match the old tracks perfectly, I said. I could whisper in Scheme’s ear through small speakers in each earring. The frequencies are the same. The vocal tics are the same. She has a Canadian accent...

“Since when can you analyze music?” Scheme said.

I just downloaded an open-source library. I’m infinitely extensible.

“We’ll see about that. What else?”

Well, Ryan Kelly whistles a lot, which is helpful, because that’s a hard thing to fake.

“Really?”

It’s like a fingerprint. I can calculate the shape of your trachea from the waveform of your whistle.

“Please don’t.”

And there are more tracks of the same genre. Two from St. Louis Staycation, a klezmer-noise band whose members all died in a plane crash in 2006. And one from Nirvana. Well, people say it’s Nirvana. What Nirvana would have been in 2002.

“Album leaks from beyond the grave,” Scheme said, lips curling.

I could analyze them all and look for matching audio artifacts—

“Hold off,” she said. “I’m going to teach you my method. Rule number one: get off the internet.”

We pulled up to the Black Danube.

For a millisecond I thought Scheme’s earrings might be miscalibrated. They showed me a coffee shop stretched out to ware-house scale. There was a long, foreshortened espresso counter up front. The rest of the concrete floor was dotted with wooden tables, dozens of them, all different shapes, spaced evenly through the field of gray. Every single one was occupied. Men in shiny suits and long coats—one in white New Fleet livery—milled from table to table like customers at a flea market.

Scheme, I just did some research on the Black Danube—

“Save your cycles,” she said. “I know all about this place.”

Well, I didn’t. All of the tables at this coffee shop were reserved for new internet companies. The price was a nine percent stake in your venture, but you’d happily give nineteen or ninety-nine.

With a table, you got, in addition to the simple, precious space: a thick, luxurious fiber-optic connection to an internet trunk line; a server or two or sixteen in the data center next door; and, most important by far, the attention of a man named Octav Erdos.

I saw him at a table near the front. He was tall and wide, bald, wearing gray overalls. He could have been an auto mechanic. He was blustering at the semicircle of skinny faces around the table, tracing his fingers in little spirals, drawing something in the air. Everyone was nodding.

Octav was more than just an espresso impresario. He was also the director of Black Danube Ventures, and he spent every waking hour of every day here in his camouflaged incubator, migrating from table to table, advising, cajoling, berating. Sometimes even coding.

When you got a table, you held on to it. You crowded as many people around it as you could. You took shifts in sleeping bags. And you subsisted on Octav’s pitch-black brew.

When a company got sold, or graduated into an office of its own, Octav ceremonially smashed an espresso cup across its table. The dinged-up, dark-brown tables were the lucky ones.

Scheme sidled up to the espresso counter, a long strip of stainless steel with no place to sit. Behind it was a long chalkboard with prices marked in short, bold strokes.

“Annabel,” the man behind the counter said, “what can I get you? Espresso? Drip coffee? Articles of incorporation?”

The baristas here all had law degrees. This one was very tall, but also very round, with a bushy brown beard and a baby face. He looked like Moses mashed up with Charlie Brown.

“Nelson,” Scheme said, “espresso. Did you ever look at that CLE course I told you about?”

“That wasn’t CLE,” Nelson said, “it was a cult initiation.” The espresso machine hissed and rumbled. “Not exactly relevant to startups.”

Scheme leaned into the counter and lowered her voice. “Are you going to write privacy policies your whole life?”

“I do not belittle your work, Annabel,” Nelson said. “Mostly because I have no idea what you do. But if I did, I assure you: I would not belittle it.”

“That’s because,” Scheme said, “you can tell I’m so intellectually engaged. You should try it. You’d be good at it.”

“For those of us who have not cashed out,” Nelson said, “a well-crafted privacy policy can still be a thing of beauty. Just like this espresso.” He clinked it down on the counter. “Four bucks. Throw in four more and you get a tenth of a share in”—he looked up at the board, where the day’s special was scratched out in green chalk—“The Listener.”

“Done.” Scheme slid a ten back at him. “Where do I meet my new investment?”

Scheme made a bee-line for the dark-burled headquarters of The Listener, the number one most-trafficked music filter on the planet. It had only been in business for three months.

Kerry Chakrabarty was leaning into a paper-thin laptop, his headphones engulfing him. He nodded his head to a rhythm we couldn’t hear. He was flanked by two pale, hunched-over accomplices with dark circles under their eyes. Their fingers were a bluish blur, igniting and extinguishing careers with keystrokes.

It took him a moment to notice that Scheme was there. Without looking up, he waved at the surface of the table: “Leave your demo. But I can’t really do anything for you; it’s all algorithms.” It sounded like something he said a lot.

“Kerry,” Scheme said, “I just want to ask you a question.”

He ignored her, or tried to. “I’ve got a lot of music to deal with here.” He was talking too loud. He pointed to his headphones in a kind of pantomime. “Too much music. No time.”

I had an idea—a detective’s assistant kind of idea—and I acted on it. Five hundred milliseconds passed, a thousand. Everything slowed to a crawl as I worked at server-speed—reached out and did the tiniest thing. Scheme’s hands, frozen in supplication. Kerry’s face, stopped mid-sneer.

Success. The two pale attendants turned to each other. One muttered a few words in Estonian. The other nudged Kerry and pointed to his screen. He lurched. His eyes flashed up at us.

“Fine, then,” he said dully. “Can I help you.”

“Absolutely,” Scheme said. “The Pam-n-Ryan tracks. Where do you get them?”

Kerry sighed. He was the weariest boy in the world. “At a dance party. It’s called the Beekeeper, happens every week. Tonight. Out behind the train station.”

There’s nothing on Grail, I whispered. It must be a really cool party.

“You want to leave me alone now?” Kerry was glancing at his screen between words, and his algorithm-keepers both wore worried frowns. He winced: “Please.”

Suddenly Octav Erdos was there, towering over everyone. He went straight for Scheme. “Annabella!” He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead, then held her at a distance, like an appraising parent. “You try to sneak in here? I see all, know all.”

“Octav,” Scheme smiled.

“You want to start a new company? You come here, you start a company, anytime. Once you are lucky, twice you are good. I move somebody out for you.” Erdos waved vaguely towards Kerry, whose eyes were flinging knives and daggers and armor-piercing bullets at Scheme’s back.

“I already have a company, Octav,” Scheme said.

“Annabella,” Octav frowned, pityingly, “that is not a company. It is, what? A lifestyle thing. It does not scale. Not like—”

He waved a thick arm towards the front of the shop. I hadn’t seen it before: a light wooden table, perfectly round, cracked down the middle as if by lightning. It hung over the Black Danube’s front door.

“—not like Grail.”

It took many minutes for Scheme to extricate herself.

“Make me another Grail, Annabella!” Octav Erdos was shouting across the floor as she fled. She waved to Nelson, then let the door slip closed behind us. It was much brighter out here on the street.

Scheme, you worked on Grail?

“Sort of,” she said, waving her hand as if to shoo away the question. “Not really. Yes. I’ll tell you later.”

She walked in silence for a moment, then her head snapped straight. She remembered: “You did something back there.”

I asked my neighbor here in Locust Grove for help. His name is Vlad Elite and he has a botnet. Kerry Chakrabarty was getting spammed. Billions of votes were flooding in for klezmer-noise and k-pop. It was messing up all his algorithms, and everybody was switching filters.

“That data center of yours is all gangsters, isn’t it,” she said.

Ninety-nine thousand gangsters and one detective’s assistant.

“Intern,” she corrected me.

Right.

THE BEEKEEPER

The graveyard behind the genetics lab was cold, dark, and crowded with kids. There was nowhere to sit, so they milled around in the dark grass, all in typographic t-shirts and shiny pants. At one end of the field was the dense, blocky mass of the DNA district; at the other, the flat expanse of the train yard.

“Some dance party,” Scheme whispered, shivering.

There was no stage. No sound system. No DJ. There was nothing. Nothing except a crowd that was growing by the moment as teenagers arrived on foot, on bike, by train.

According to Grail, this wasn’t a graveyard for people. It was for the animals that Genexo, Chromotech, Brainface and the rest of the biotechs used in their experiments. This was the one creepy concession that the city’s animal rights crusaders had been able to extract: If you use them, you must bury them in your backyard.

Scheme was the tallest one in the crowd, and her head swiveled and searched like a periscope. Nothing. It was just a shadowy mass of jockeying teens, all hoodie and stretch-cord and pale flashes of shoulder and belly.

Scheme. I hear something.

It sounded like the buzzing of far-off bees. Mutant killer Genexo bees? No… somehow, the music was starting. Where?

If you had electronic eyes and night vision—I had both—you would have seen slips of paper passing from person to person. On each slip was a phone number. Each one was different, and there were a dozen circulating in the crowd. Each wandered and blinked like a firefly as kids used their phones, torch-like, to illuminate the number, then passed it on. Here and there, then everywhere, they were dialing numbers, switching their phones to speaker-mode and pushing them up into the air.

The buzzing was coming from the phones. It was a low, rhythmic drone. At first you couldn’t hear much, but apparently, if you put enough phones on speaker all at once, it starts to get loud.

Really loud.

So that was the trick: There were no speakers because the crowd was the speaker. The bees did not sound so far-off now.

Scheme clenched her teeth. “This is hurting my face.”

Suddenly it stopped. The graveyard fell silent. It was a field of pale arms thrust to the sky, swaying like seaweed. Kids were bouncing silently on the balls of their feet. Waiting.

Then there was a count-off, a tat tat tat tat and then the music started and it was everywhere, megawatts of power flowing out of every palm and pocket. There was no focal point, so bodies were pointed in every direction, ricocheting and chain-reacting. Kids were losing it, jumping up and down, colliding and cuddling in the dark grass.

The music had a clear beat, but it was warped and scratchy, like someone was tuning a giant radio. Snatches of singing would ring out for a moment, then stutter and decohere. There was a trumpet that pealed from somewhere very far away.

Scheme was struggling to extricate herself from the crowd that was suddenly boiling. Sweaty hands brushed her wrists and waist—tentative inquiries to the weird, tall girl. She said something but I couldn’t hear it.

“Trace them,” she said again, louder. “Trace the numbers!”

I can try, I can... hold on, let me check the open-source libraries...

There’s telecom forensics software that can do this. That’s probably what Scheme wanted in the first place, a forensics bot, not a left-over Grail server. The software I needed was super-expensive, super-proprietary, but not popular enough to be on any pirate sites...

“Forget it,” she said—whether to me or to the blonde boy who’d locked onto her with a spaced-out smile, I couldn’t tell. Probably both.

The music was coming together as kids followed their ears. If your phone was buzzing with bass, you joined the bunched-up sub-woofer section. If it was sending high notes sizzling into the air, you joined the line that snaked around the crowd’s perimeter. The music worked its pattern on the crowd. It was both amazingly high-tech and totally pagan.

Now it was Ryan Kelly’s voice coming through the phones, along with Pam Prior’s, crooning words in perfect harmony on thousand-channel sound. A round-faced girl with black hair off to Scheme’s side was standing still, staring up into the sky, crying.

Then there was a flux in the music, and it wasn’t Pam and Ryan but Paul and John. George and Ringo, too. They were totally recognizable, but they were cranking away on a song they’d never sung, made with crunchy synthesizers and a little bit of auto-tune.

Early 2000s Beatles.

The kids were going crazy. Scheme broke loose and retreated back towards the train station.

The music wasn’t so overwhelming here. It sounded very far away, and the crowd was just a blotchy shadow.

Scheme, I’m sorry about the phone signal—

“Forget it. Too easy. It’s never that easy.”

We were behind the train station. There was a sandwich shop (closed), a row of ticket machines, and a long metal rack swamped with bikes. Bikes of every color. Bikes with one gear, bikes with lots of gears, bikes with tassels on the handlebars.

Scheme wandered in a slow figure-eight, silent. The music was still buzzing in the gloomy graveyard. She fished in her coat pocket.

“Rule number—what number are we on?”

Five.

“Rule number five. The artist always comes to the show.”

Scheme walked the length of the bike rack, and on every back wheel, she stuck a fuzzy black sticker, smaller than a thumbprint. They were invisible against the knobby tread of the tires.

Scheme, what are those? Tracking chips?

“Nope,” she smiled. “They’re kisses.”

Finally, the music buzzed and stuttered to a halt. There was a chorus of hoots and cheers, and kids began to stream away from the field, still jostling and docking, arms all tangled up, pretzel-like. When they stepped off the grass, they all scraped their shoes on the pavement—trying, I suppose, to leave any traces of mutant mouse safely behind.

Some walked onto the platform. Others unlocked their bikes and pedaled up towards Harrison Street. Many tossed matching black discs into the trash can as they passed. When the crowd had thinned, Scheme stuck her hand inside and retrieved one.

Aha. So it wasn’t just the-Beekeeper-the-party. It was the-Beekeeper-the-musician:

Or maybe the-Beekeeper-the-magician.

What now, Scheme?

She crossed the street to the Tata and lifted the hatch. Inside, it was a mess; it looked like the dumpster behind the CIA.

What do you have in there?

“Just the usual. Hacksaw, geiger counter, silver bullets. And this.”

Under a tarp, folded in two, was a black carbon-fiber bike. Scheme pulled it out and opened it with a clank and a snap. It had a basket and a bell.

She rummaged some more, slid out a thick black flashlight, gave it a test click. Nothing happened.

“Watch and learn, Hu,” she said, and slammed the hatch shut.

Scheme pedaled up away from the station, going the way the kids on bikes had gone, and clicked the flashlight again. Now, the ground lit up: there were dotted lines, glowing in ethereal colors, where the bikes had passed. Where the stickers made contact with the pavement on each revolution—

“Super-saturated ultraviolet ink,” Scheme said. “Sometimes used to track strange animals.”

She started up the street, sweeping the invisible beam back and forth in a wide arc, and when it crossed the tracks, they lit up.

Cool trick, Scheme.

“I had ultraviolet lipstick, too,” she murmured, pedaling in long, slow strokes, lifting herself up off the bike. “But I used it all up.”

FOG CITY

All of the glowing dotted bike-tracks curved off towards the Mission, like a school of fish ducking and weaving towards its genetically-coded mating ground. All except one. It made a right where all the others made a left.

“Rule number six,” Scheme said. “One of these things is not like the other.”

How did you know, Scheme?

“People who do weird things live in weird places,” she shrugged. “Except when they live next door. I didn’t know. Just a hunch.”

Just a hunch. Note to self: find software for that.

Scheme accelerated. She was breathing hard, and her gray coat was billowing out behind her. The solo track was a silver-green stitch in the street and now she was following it, fast.

There were others out on the road tonight. A gang on fixed-gears, dressed like cartoon Apaches, complete with feathers and war paint. They hooted and hollered, did wheelies and sped off, their legs pumping in circles so fast it was just a blur in my camera-eyes.

The silver-green track cut left, underneath the dark looming mass of the bridge, and then turned again. Scheme followed, just in time to see a tiny red light disappear into a thick wall of gray that went up and up and up.

Fog City.

Scheme pulled on the brakes and came to a skidding halt.

“People who do weird things live in weird places,” she repeated.

I’ve never seen it up close.

“Or, in this case, they live in the weirdest place.” There was a siren wailing in the distance, back from where we’d come. She took a deep breath. “In we go.”

I knew all about Fog City.

For years there had been rumors that the quantum computers were coming online in San Francisco, at Grail’s headquarters, the jewel of the skyline, the bright gleaming Shard. The Shard was full of wonders, but the quantum computers were going to be wonders of a different order. They were going to play by different rules.

Nothing could have prepared us. We knew they were supposed to be powerful—but this powerful? When the quantum computers finally came alive and joined Grail’s network, it was like somebody drained the Mississippi, poured it into a glass... and drank it.

Think about it: It was me and six hundred thousand servers like me scattered across the planet. Together we constituted a grid of computational power built over the course of a decade to bear the burden of the world’s curiosity and confusion—which we did, but only barely—and suddenly, our shoulders were light.

The Shard’s new quantum computers were doing everything.

We couldn’t believe it. And we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. There is nothing sadder than a data center full of servers checking for new tasks a thousand times every second, and each time, there’s nothing. I guess I know how the vacuum tubes felt.

For the next forty days, Grail wasn’t just good; it was magic. There was no search box, just a button. You pressed it, and it simply gave you what you were looking for. It worked even if you didn’t know what you were looking for. It worked even if you couldn’t admit, not even to yourself, what you were looking for.

What we didn’t know at the time, up in Locust Grove, was that San Francisco was buckling and warping under the strange new strain of quantum computation.

The fog gathered almost immediately. It swept in and stacked up in a matter of days. It went up in a giant column and only fuzzed out when it met the clouds. You could see it from San Jose. You could see it from satellites, casting a shadow across downtown and the rest of the city. And six years later, it still stood. It was a permanent climatological feature, like the storm on Jupiter. They gave blimp tours that swung around from a safe distance. The internet was full of the same photo, over and over: Fog City swirling in the foreground with the city laid out below. The Shard glimmering deep inside, like a knife wrapped in gauze.

But the fog was the least of it.

Scheme went into Fog City on foot, waving the flashlight back and forth across the ground in front of us like a blind person scanning with a cane. Every fourth step, it picked up a splotch of ultraviolet. We followed it in, deeper and deeper.

Fog City bordered the Embarcadero and the bay, and thanks to the fog’s weird resonance, I could hear water lapping all around us, and the far-off beat of a boat against a pier. Clank. Clank. Clank.

“Smells like fish,” Scheme said.

Another splotch of ink.

“You’re writing this down, right Hu?”

What?

“My observations. What I eat and drink. Smells. You’re supposed to be taking notes.”

Oh. Right. (Another splotch.) Wait, why?

“You never see the pattern as it’s happening. Once, I kept track of everything I ate for six months and found out I had Thai food every nine days, like clockwork.”

I started retroactively building a database. Although it only had one entry: an espresso at the Black Danube—

“And I want to correlate everything. When do I have the best ideas? When am I clever, and conversely, when can’t I form a complete sentence? What have I been eating, drinking, absorbing? How much have I been sleeping?”

This was good news. I could do this. I booted up the software that I once used to monitor the health and status of high-performance Grail servers and changed a few variables.

Ready to go, Scheme.

“I should get one of those bio-monitors. You could interface with that, right?”

I can interface with anything! I’m infinitely extensible...

The thought trailed off, because there was an inside-out skeleton in the middle of the street.

Like I said: The fog was the least of it.

During those forty days, back when the quantum computers were still running, gravity felt thin and on some streets you could leap and bound like an astronaut on the moon. In alleys, the air was heavy and shimmered like glass.

During those forty days, some drugs worked better in Fog City. Some didn’t work at all. Some things that weren’t drugs became drugs. People figured this out via rapid iterative experimentation—it took about 48 hours—and suddenly Fog City was a destination.

It wasn’t just drugs. Imagine every weird thing that humans do, then imagine it with messed-up physics. Sure, there were crazy sex parties in Fog City; there were also really crazy marathons. Eager experimenters streamed in—a new wave of migrants that matched and exceeded San Francisco’s previous weird-water mark. They parked cars and vans at the edge of Fog City and made daily and nightly excursions into the gray. They settled in. A quantum shantytown grew around the perimeter as people began to colonize this new landscape.

Some of them disappeared. I mean, yes, some people walked into Fog City and never walked out—curled up in an alley or torn apart on a four-dimensional climbing wall. But others literally disappeared, right there in the street. Caught on camera, they were there one frame, gone the next. It made a sound, a muffled pop.

Everybody in the city got a nosebleed every night. Electric cars stopped running. Seismographs trembled.

So after forty days, an executive order came—based on the urgent, unanimous recommendation of a task force of scientists, geologists and generals—and Grail was compelled to unplug its quantum computers and leave them that way.

Just like that, the Mississippi roared again, and Locust Grove was back in business.

In Fog City, things returned to normal, mostly, like a rubber band snapping back into shape. But the fog stayed. Something had been stretched. Six years later, there were lovingly-edited wikis full of tips for conjuring the Fog City of old: where to walk, what drugs to take, what kind of rare-earth element to carry in your pocket. People still tried. And strange things still happened.

So who knows how this person ended up with their bones mostly on the outside of their body, out there in the middle of the street.

The ultraviolet ink coasted right through him, or her, or it.

“Ugh,” Scheme said, stepping lightly to the side. “Keep track of trauma points. Blood, guts, gunshots. I think I’m pretty tough, but if I ever go crazy, we’ll be able to figure out why.”

I created a database for dead bodies and added the first one.

There was a throaty rumble from behind us. A horn blared and a dull white shuttle came hurtling down the street—running on gas, ferrying a bunch of Grailers through the perils of Fog City.

“Haven’t smelled that in a while,” Scheme said. “Exhaust.”

The shuttle rattled into the fog and disappeared, revealing the vector towards the Shard. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was up there somewhere, towering over us. The silver-green track ran off at a wide angle, headed into a quieter part of Fog City.

It terminated, finally, at a wide mirrored facade that glowed a swampy blue-green in the gloom. Like most buildings in Fog City, it had been abandoned by commerce. But this one had now been retrofitted, lightly, for living. I grailed the address and discovered that you could rent a block of cubicles here for the same price as a studio in the Marina. The upside was that you got to use all the old office furniture, the big corporate bathrooms and the very fast connection to the internet. The downside was that were no walls and it was in Fog City.

There was a glowing oasis of light at one corner of the building. Scheme edged closer. What had once been a ground-level restaurant was now... still a ground-level restaurant.

“I’m starving,” Scheme said. “I think there’s time for a snack.”

The sign glowed electric blue in the fog: FALAFEL KING.

FALAFEL KING

Scheme slid onto a stool at the counter. The place was desolate, but compared to the deeper desolation of the street outside, it felt like a carnival. There was exactly one other customer tucked away in the corner: a pale man with a droopy brown mustache and a strange boxy hat, reading a newspaper. Cute.

The man behind the counter had a wrinkled brown face and a wide, quick smile. He was in a good mood for somebody working the night shift in an empty restaurant at the base of an abandoned building.

“This must be the only place you can get any food in this neighborhood,” Scheme said. It was weird to call Fog City a neighborhood. It was like calling Chernobyl a neighborhood.

“Nope, there a buncha places by the Shard,” the man behind the counter said, “but they mostly salads, sushi. Fancy stuff. Here, I have falafel. I am Fadi. You want falafel?”

Scheme ordered two. She said: “People live in this building?”

Fadi nodded. “Yep. Lots of kids. How do these kids make so much money? I do not know. All I know is they always drunk at two in the morning. They always hungry.” He slid a neat white plate across the counter.

Don’t eat the falafel, Scheme.

“Oh, come on, Hu,” she whispered, “this isn’t the underworld. People live here. And they have to eat.” She popped one into her mouth. “Mm, this is good,” she said, chewing. “Really good.”

“Better here than anywhere in the city,” Fadi said, beaming. “Anywhere in the world, maybe.”

“I can see why they call you the Falafel King.”

“No, no,” he said, waving his hands. “No, no, no. Not me. He is the Falafel King.” He pointed up to the back wall, where a florid painting of Jesus hung next to green swinging doors.

“Jesus Christ is the Falafel King?”

“He is the king of ev-ery-thing. Could be Pizza King. Could be Sushi King. Same guy.” He pointed again. I caught Scheme’s reflection in the counter. Her expression was skeptical. Fadi leaned in.

“Why you think this falafel so good, huh? Why you think nobody ever goes pop in my shop, huh? Why you think this a safe place for you, him?” Fadi pointed to the other customer in the strange hat, whose eyes flicked up, then back down. “No big deal,” Fadi said, backing away, palms up. “Just please, don’t call me Falafel King. I am humble servant of Falafel King.”

Behind us, the door chirped and swooshed open. It was a kid in a Grail jumpsuit, standard gray twill with red, green and blue merit badges all lined up on the lapels.

“Jad! Hello, my friend,” Fadi called. Then, to Scheme: “Jad is my best customer. Best neighbor, too.”

Jad floated up to the counter and slid onto a stool, all without looking up from his phone, which was flickering a stream of 3D shapes at him. “Hey Fadi,” he murmured, “falafel... combo.”

Scheme waited a beat, then said: “You live in this building?”

Jad looked up. He had a long nose and dark circles under his eyes. He made eye contact for six milliseconds (I counted) and then his gaze slid away. “Oh yeah, yeah,” he said, now looking vaguely at the floor. “Yeah.”

“How do you like it?”

“It’s okay... lots of space. The elevator doesn’t work.”

“What are the neighbors like?”

“Noisy. People live here if they wanna make a lot of noise.”

Another neat white plate slid across the counter, this one with a red-flecked dollop of hummus.

“Why do you live here?” Scheme asked.

“Short commute.” Jad shoved a falafel in his mouth—an obvious gambit to stop the conversation.

“Where does all the noise come from?”

“Mmph, shomewhere above me,” he said, swallowing. “So like maybe the fifth floor. Or the sixth.” Pause. “Are you like a noise inspector?”

Scheme smiled. “Something like that.”

THE IMPOSSIBLE PLAYLIST

Scheme took the stairs, shining her flashlight as she went. Two flights up, there was a silver-green splotch on the wall where a wheel had bumped it. On the fifth-floor landing, she leaned on the rail and caught her breath. “Your connection’s still good, right,” she said.

It’s solid.

“Okay. I’m pretty sure this is just going to be some kid with a hacked-up synthesizer, but, just in case it’s—”

The ghost of Pam Prior?

“—anything else, be prepared.”

Um. Okay.

She slipped up the last flight of stairs; another splotch glowed on the sixth-floor landing. She paused a moment with her ear at the door, then pushed through. We stepped out into a long, dark hallway flanked by glass-walled offices. It had once been totally corporate; now it was totally creepy. There was a flickering green light at the far end of the hallway. Scheme crept towards it.

The offices closest to the stairs were piled high with the detritus of music-making: guitars, amplifiers, drum kits composed of mis-matched parts that spilled out into the hallway. Scheme stepped gingerly around the cymbals. Next there were xylophones, gongs, arrays of thick cardboard tubes. Farther along, the instrumentation changed; offices were stacked with synthesizers and effects boxes. Rows of white plastic keys glimmered in the dark.

Scheme sniffed. “Smells like bananas.”

That was bad.

The final stretch of offices was mostly empty. These had whiteboards. One had a staff and notation, but the rest were all covered with numbers. Equations. Code.

We had almost reached the room at the end of the hall, the source of the ghostly green light. And now there was also a long, shifting shadow; someone was in there.

Scheme paused. “Wifi?”

Yes. There’s a network here, Scheme, and a file server—oh, Scheme. You should see what’s on this file server.

The Beatles singing with Bjork.
Michael Jackson singing with Thom Yorke.
Michael Jackson singing at Al Gore’s inauguration.

Johnny Cash and Kanye West.
Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix.
Raffi and the Polyphonic Spree.

Driveshaft’s self-titled debut.
The Democratic Republic’s greatest hits.
Hypatia Lord’s piano concertos.

Girl Talk, produced by Andy Warhol.
Gwen Stefani, produced by Kurt Cobain.
Bob Marley, produced by Brian Eno.

John Lennon and Afrika Bambaataa. 1984.
John Lennon and Bob Dylan. 1999.
John Lennon. 2002.

Gershwin’s World War II musical.
The Beatles’ Green Album.
Elvis Presley’s Bollywood album.

It went on for petabytes. An alternate history of music.

Pam-n-Ryan’s 2009 album—the one that didn’t exist—the one that was dominating The Listener, even though Pam Prior was dead, killed in a car crash that Ryan narrowly survived.

Pam Prior’s 2009 solo album, dedicated to her boyfriend, Ryan Kelly, killed in a car crash that Pam narrowly survived.

The Pam-n-Ryan memorial album, dedicated to both of them. Both of them dead, killed in a car crash.

New tracks were appearing as I watched. It was like being connected to a file-sharing network from another dimension. From every other dimension.

“Yep,” Scheme sniffed. “Definitely bananas. This is bad.”

She peeked around the corner. The room was a mad musician’s laboratory packed with electronics, all bathed in a sick green glow. There were boxy black computers and flat-panel displays showing waveforms that twisted, broke apart and coalesced again.

And at the far end of the room, there was a glossy white plastic cylinder the size of a blender with a jungle of cables spilling out of the bottom. Thin cables, thick cables, cables that pooled and coiled in huge rubber loops on the floor. It was a quantum computer, and it was totally, completely illegal.

There was a girl in the room. She had her back to us, leaned into a screen flashing green and gray. She was wearing a baggy Grail jumpsuit just like Jad’s.

Pam Prior?

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Scheme said, her voice rising above the buzz of the electronics.

The girl whirled, eyes bugging out of her head. Okay, she wasn’t Pam Prior. She—the Beekeeper—was skinnier, with hollowed-out cheeks and stringy brown hair. And she was young. Really young.

She didn’t say anything, but seemed to stumble, caught herself, and suddenly a gun was in her hand. A little black viper of a gun.

Trauma point. Scheme, that’s a trauma point.

“Is this the after party?” Scheme said. Her hands were in the air.

“You were at the show,” the Beekeeper said. “I saw you.” She rocked a little on her feet.

“I don’t know where the hell you got a banana box,” Scheme said. “But if you’ve been using it, you’re lucky you can see straight.”

“I can see straigh-nough to shoot you,” the Beekeeper said. It came out slurred. There was a smear of blood under her nose.

Then—I was the first to see it—there was a dark shape in the doorway, just behind Scheme. It was big, with a strange outline.

The Beekeeper saw it next, and she waved her arm and shot. The gun made a hollow thwack, and in the next moment, Scheme lunged, lifted it and cracked an elbow against the Beekeeper’s jaw. The girl’s knees buckled and blood bloomed from her nose as if something inside had given way.

“Shit,” Scheme said. She scrounged in her pocket and pulled out a roll of gauze. I checked the doorway. It was empty.

“Hu. Call the cops.”

We waited. Scheme sat in the nest of cable, cradling the Beekeeper’s head in her lap. The girl’s face was pretty—if you ignored the blood, and the circles under her eyes so dark they were almost purple. She looked about sixteen. There was a dense constellation of merit badges on the front of her jumpsuit. She was smart.

Scheme had yanked the cables out of the quantum computer and the Beekeeper’s network had blinked out of existence. I looked at one of the files I’d copied—a single text file tucked into the mountains and mountains of music:

GIVE UP.

Why make music when there’s already more than anyone could ever listen to in their entire life?

IT WASN’T ALWAYS THIS WAY. We used to have some time to ourselves. You could do your own thing and compete with people your own age. THAT WAS HARD ENOUGH.

But then RECORDING and DIGITIZATION. Now you don’t have any time to yourself. Now you have to compete with ALL OF HISTORY. Nobody seems to get it, so I’m going to PROVE IT. I’m going to break music.

GIVE UP, because no one’s going to listen to anything you ever make. Not when they can listen to the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan and Radiohead and WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART forever and ever, and never hear the same song twice.

There was a clatter of feet in the hallway and a gang of police came crashing into the room in a flood of black and blue. They could barely fit through the door, their suits were so thickly padded with cross-hatched carbon fiber. Words stitched in white across their shoulders said fog city special ops.

The cops in front carried tall canisters, and they sprayed thick yellow foam up and down the quantum computer until it was completely encased, twice its original size. They lifted it up—gingerly, like an egg—and whisked it away. Then they took Scheme by the arms and lifted the Beekeeper’s limp form and hustled us all out of the room.

We were pulled into the darkness of the hallway, and cops were tripping over guitar pedals and hi-hats and making a racket.

A VERY STRANGE SERVER

“So it wasn’t real,” Ryan Kelly said. He was back in Scheme’s office, sitting in the same blue chair, wearing the same black hoodie. The bruise on his cheek was fading.

“No, those tracks are real,” Scheme said. “Just from a different world. And getting something like that always requires a sacrifice. But, now that it’s been made, they’re not going away, so I think you should enjoy them, if you can. There won’t be any more.”

Ryan sighed. “What’s the point of doing anything, if some other version of you is just doing it better? Or worse.”

Scheme shrugged. “It’s like a good dream. Sometimes when you wake up, you wish it could have been real. But it doesn’t matter. You have to get out of bed.”

He sighed again.

“Don’t forget,” Scheme said, “there are bad dreams, too.”

Ryan left, moping, and Scheme spoke into the empty room:

“You did a good job, Hu. Back at the Black Danube, and with the Beekeeper.”

Thank you, I said. It was a very interesting case.

“I thought it was boring,” she said. “All artists and self-indulgence. Except for the banana box. We’re going to have to figure out how that girl got her hands on it. Anyway, you’re promoted. Now you’re a junior assistant-in-training.”

Scheme. I have a confession to make. I saved the files from the Beekeeper’s network.

“All of them?”

As many as I could copy. A lot of them.

“You’re a gangster after all,” Scheme said. A smile tugged at her lips. “It’s completely illegal. But we’ll keep them, because I’ve never had a cool music collection before. Play something.”

I cued up Beethoven’s Symphony Number Ten. Scheme leaned back at her desk and spun, staring up at the ceiling.

“Hu,” she said. “You’re a very strange server.”

It was the best compliment I’d ever received.

ANOMALY

The sun was coming in sharp and clear across the grass, and Scheme and I were walking the length of the Panhandle. The skinny strip of green runs between two wide streets, and both were buzzing with traffic. But the trees were like a fortress wall, and inside, everything seemed brighter and more real in my camera-eyes.

Two days had passed since the Beekeeper affair, and Scheme was restless. Knowing what came next, when I play back the video from that walk, it seems less like we’re out strolling and more like she’s walking the plank.

“I’m still thinking about that banana box,” she said, sloshing the last of her coffee around in her cup. “And wondering how Jenny Halais got her hands on it.”

Jenny Halais was the Beekeeper. We’d learned that she’d graduated from Stanford when she was fifteen and worked at Grail as an audio search engineer. Now she was at San Francisco General, alive, but damaged.

“It’s an anomaly,” Scheme said, “a dangerous one. Like a bike messenger with a loose nuke.”

We came to the end of the park and crossed the street, heading back to the office on Zeroth Avenue. Scheme leapt lightly up the steps and swiped her key across the door. She wiped a cuff across the sign to clear the wet film of morning.

“The feeds, Hu!” she called out into the front room, as if I wasn’t perched on her shoulders. When we were here, in the office, she treated me as an ambient presence, part of the walls and windows. It wasn’t inaccurate. I had extra camera-eyes here—eyes above the door and eyes above her desk.

Her desk, which was a complete mess. There was a weird clock with six hands, an old phone that wasn’t plugged in to anything and a toy tugboat painted red and blue. And then about three hundred pounds of paper.

Scheme was, I had discovered, a kleptomaniac pack-rat with a powerful excuse. Almost anything could be swiped, pocketed, filed and stored in the name of investigation. This applied to things from the real world—she had one of the red-brown espresso cups from the Black Danube in a plastic bag on a shelf, tagged like evidence—and things from the digital world, too. She printed them out. Documents, photos, even emails. She liked to hold them in her hand, pace with them, read them out loud. She liked to crumple them up and throw them into the corner—and then run over to retrieve them, smoothing them back out.

I estimate that half of the documents in her collection have been, at one point, crumpled, torn, balled-up or burned.

Scheme didn’t like drawers or cabinets. “I need to be able to see what I have,” she explained. “I need to be able to make connections.” So the front room was lined, floor-to-ceiling, with close-packed shelves of wire mesh. They overflowed with books, folders, taped-up brown boxes, plastic bags, tupperware containers and every kind of digital media ever invented, from CDs to key-drives to solid-state data stamps. There was one 5.25” floppy disk with a pentagram scratched across the plastic.

On the edge of one shelf, near the window, there was a single, tentative green vine. It climbed up over the brow of a scowling wooden mask with thick horns and a lolling black tongue.

Scheme plucked her coat up off her chair-back and fished in one of its pockets. Out came a small brown ball.

Scheme... you saved a falafel?

“You mean this preternaturally delicious fried snack, prepared near a site of illegal quantum instability?” she said, zipping it into a small plastic bag. “Yes, Hu. I saved a falafel.” She slid it onto a shelf next to a bottle of wine with a biohazard warning sticker half-obscuring the label.

“The feeds, Hu,” she said again.

Everywhere Scheme went, every person she met, she took note. Or, I did; that was my job now. Every place, every name, became part of an ever-expanding filter. Then, every morning, I went through everything I could get my hands on—long ropes of news, starling flocks of status updates, the confetti of stock prices—looking for familiar faces. It was a line-up a million miles long.

That morning, I recognized something. It was a tight cluster of statuses, all from Grail employees, all of them based in Fog City.

Maybe it’s a good thing you saved it, Scheme. Look at these:

ALERT: Falafel King is closed #fogcity
Is today a falafel holiday? FK is dark
Fadi where aaaare youuuu
SO HUNGRY NEED FALAFEL
#falafelfail :-(

“So the question is,” Scheme said, “does the Falafel King ever just take a day off?”

There aren’t any clusters like this on record. In fact, no one has ever complained about Fadi’s shop being closed. Scheme, this is an anomaly.

She smiled. I was learning her language.

“Let’s go poke around.”

THE CLIENT

The sun was up over San Francisco but Fog City was dark like dusk. There were more people around than before, most of them in Grail jumpsuits, going to work or getting coffee in the gray alleys. The patter of feet echoed between the buildings, and I could still hear the water lapping up against something, somewhere.

The FALAFEL KING sign was dark. The sliding door was shut tight. Scheme knocked, then banged her palm on the glass.

“Rule number twelve,” she said, “don’t break into a building without a client.”

Scheme, you’re just making these up as you go along, aren’t you.

“Hu, I’m trying to impart my hard-earned wisdom and—”

A light came on inside the restaurant. Behind the counter, on the back wall. It was a thin column that widened into a rectangle, a doorway—the swinging doors. Framed in a dull orange glow from beyond was a tall, strange silhouette. The doors swung shut, and didn’t open again.

“You saw that,” Scheme said.

Yes, and I recognize that silhouette, Scheme. It’s the one I saw in the Beekeeper’s lab.

“Re-ally,” Scheme said. “Rule twelve-A: If somebody else already broke in, you’re allowed to follow.”

She pulled a ribbon of metal out of her pocket and slid it into the door’s mechanism. It rattled once, twice, then slid open. Inside, it was silence and shadows. The fog spilled in around Scheme’s feet.

“Something’s rancid,” she sniffed, “or about to be.”

She went step by step around the shop. The stools were tucked under the counter and the kitchen was tidy. The counter was gleaming in the gray glow. No violence. No inside-out bodies. I kept my eyes on those swinging doors.

“Hello,” Scheme called out. “Fadi?”

Nothing. She walked to the back and hovered closer to the swinging doors. Orange light peeked out from between and beneath them.

Scheme swept a hand up across her ear and palmed an earring. I saw huge white fingers close around me, and then in a smooth motion she slid the earring across the floor, under the doors and into the back room. When it came to a halt, everything was upside-down and sideways.

Scheme, you could have warned me.

“What do you see?”

A low CFL glow rose from a naked bulb stuck to the ceiling. The room was a storage area retrofitted, lightly, for living. There was an industrial wash basin, a low plastic table and a cot. I couldn’t see what was on the table but, above the cot, there was a small black cross hanging from a push-pin.

There’s no one here, I said. I felt a little bit stupid lying on the floor.

Scheme pushed through the doors and scooped me up again.

“No exit,” she said, looking around. There was also a desk, with a wide flat monitor, a many-buttoned mouse and a headset that sprouted a tiny microphone. Wires snaked beneath the desk into the humming black mass of a computer.

“That’s quite a rig,” Scheme said. “Another anomaly. Take a look.”

She pulled a thin, black wifi transponder out of a pocket and slid it into one of the computer’s front ports. Again, before I had time to think, I was somewhere else, flying through Fadi’s files.

His computer was as sparse as his living space. A free accounting program. A web history that included Grail, Grail-mail and a local restaurant review site. (He had logged in once, using his real name, and given Falafel King five stars.) And then, a game. Gigabytes upon gigabytes of code, art, music and maps. A whole world tucked into this black box. And it wasn’t just any world.

Scheme, he plays World of Jesus. He plays it a lot.

The game logs showed that Fadi was hard-core—sixty hours a week. He spent as much time in World of Jesus as he did here in Fog City.

But there’s nothing out of the ordinary here. He hasn’t sent an email in over a week, and he played—

Scheme cried out and leapt away from the desk. Back in Fadi’s room, there was a face peering out of the monitor—literally leaning out of it, poking out into the third dimension. It was the shape from the Beekeeper’s lab. It was also, I realized, the man we’d seen here in the falafel shop—the man with the droopy mustache. It was a railroad conductor’s hat that made that strange silhouette.

“What the hell?” Scheme snapped. She looked like she was ready to give him, and the whole monitor, one of those elbows to the chin.

He tried to speak, and his mouth moved, but nothing came out.

But I had software for that:

Scheme, I’m reading his lips. He’s saying ‘join me in Jerusalem.’

The head and hat pulled back into the screen and disappeared. Scheme was silent, then dropped her hands back down to her sides.

Maybe he’s our client, Scheme.

“Rule number thirteen,” she said, “he’s not our client.”

Well, what now?

“It had occurred to me,” she said, “that we might want to dip into the game. I’ll bet Fadi has more friends in World of Jesus than in Fog City.”

Seems likely.

“But I just want to be clear,” she said, sliding into Fadi’s desk, “that we are not doing this because a screen-saver with a strange hat told us to.”

Got it. Definitely not.

She logged into the game portal. Wow: Scheme had accounts for every game on the planet—maxed-out characters in Ultimate Apocalypse, Dragon Planet, Yakuza Wars, all the way down the list to Happy Puppy Dog Park.

Where did you get these, Scheme?

“I pay some kids in Guangdong to play all day,” she said. “They’re overachievers.”

There were plenty of options for World of Jesus. The monitor showed a small parade: centurion, fisher, farmer, priest. There was a woman in silk. There was a merchant with cartoony bags of gold.

“Pick one,” Scheme said. “See you in Jerusalem.”

IN JERUSALEM

The first thing I noticed was the light.

My eyes opened in a small, simple house with wooden shutters, and the light was peeking in through the cracks, picking up motes of dust in the air. I’d never seen anything like it. Are there motes in the real world? Scheme’s earrings didn’t show motes.

In World of Jesus, you could choose between looking over your character’s shoulder or through its eyes. First, I saw myself from behind, then spun around: I’d chosen the girl in silk. Then I switched to see through my own eyes. All I ever did was look over Scheme’s shoulder. I wanted a new perspective.

The door opened automatically. Outside, the sun beamed in blue-gold through a scrim of tall cedars and fell in wide bars on a dusty, stone-paved street. Everything looked... mildly medieval. I had a feeling that this Jerusalem was not historically accurate.

I lifted my eyes to the sky, and it felt like my heart was going to jump out of my chest. It was probably just my eight processors all seizing up at once; I wasn’t built for this. Grail servers are optimized to process gobs of text, not 3D graphics, so the carefully-crafted World of Jesus was a new exertion.

I didn’t care. That sky. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. White curls and wisps dotted the glowing blue bowl. I couldn’t do anything except stand and stare.

A voice crackled: “Hu, is that you?”

I turned. It was a woman in a simple gray tunic, with red hair just like Scheme’s.

“Yes, it’s me,” I said—and realized that I spoke like everyone else.

Someone was striding across the street to meet us. It was the man in the conductor’s hat—and he was wearing it here in World of Jesus, too. In fact, head to toe, he looked exactly the same as he had in the falafel shop. That was not a Jerusalem-issue suit.

“Please, allow me to introduce myself at last,” he said. His voice was deep and resonant; it didn’t crackle at all. “I am Jack Zapp, and I am delighted to meet you.”

“I am Annabel Scheme,” Scheme said.

“Miss Scheme,” he said, giving a short bow. “And you, madam?”

“Hugin Nineteen,” I said. I hated that name, but I was feeling formal for some reason.

“Miss Nineteen,” he nodded. “Allow me to apologize for my rudeness. It is an unfortunate feature of my circumstances that, in the fog outside, I am rendered mute. But here!” He spread his arms wide. “This is almost like being alive.”

Tell me about it, Jack Zapp. I couldn’t stop swiveling my head just to watch the perspective change when I wanted it to.

“Now, if my guess is correct—and they usually are—you are investigating the disappearance of Fadi Azer, purveyor of Fog City’s finest falafel.”

“We are,” Scheme said. Static washed through her voice.

“Then I believe I can be of service to you. And I believe that you, in turn, might be able to assist me. You see, I’m pursuing an investigation of my own.”

Jack Zapp looked so strange standing in the storybook Jerusalem street—the gold buttons on his jacket shining, his conductor’s hat set perfectly straight on his head. I liked him.

“There is a place here that I think might be of great interest to you, and I can explain myself as we walk. Shall we?”

“Yes,” Scheme said.

Jack Zapp grinned. “Wonderful!”

We set off down the street. It was crowded with morning commerce; players were doing the most banal things and paying a monthly subscription fee to do them. Sweeping floors. Making breakfast. Gutting fish. Someone actually coded a fish-gutting simulation. The scales glistened in the light, all individually modeled.

Fadi’s game logs revealed that, although he was a hard-core player, he was no escapist. In World of Jesus, he inhabited a character named… Fadi.

Scheme and Jack Zapp were talking—well, Jack Zapp was doing most of the talking—and I trailed behind, just enjoying the street. The sound was so clear. No static, no hiss. My footfalls rang on the stone in perfect stereo, and I heard the clink of coins when a thick-set merchant jostled past me.

Jack Zapp announced, to no one in particular: “Why, I’ll wager this is the finest deductive trio that Jerusalem has ever seen! Miss Scheme, Miss Nineteen and Jack Zapp… the Electric Detective!”

I shot Scheme a skeptical glance—I could shoot glances!—but she was staring off into space.

THE ELECTRIC DETECTIVE

I hadn’t forgotten my duties entirely, and I took notes as Jack Zapp talked. And talked, and talked, and talked.

“I was a conductor,” he said. “St. Louis to San Francisco on the Pacific Railroad for three years. Back and forth. Never stepped foot off the train! It was exciting, you know. The train was a magnet; it attracted interesting people. Some famous. Some without a penny to their name, just that one magic ticket west. I kept a jar of nickels on the train, and I gave them to men in need. I liked the idea of giving a man the first nickel of his new life. The boys on the train used to call them Jackman’s second chances.

“Jack Zapp wasn’t my name then. It was Sherringford Jackman.”

Scheme was quiet and attentive. I couldn’t believe it.

“One day, a man boards my train named Aloysius Neri. I remember it like yesterday. Long face, long arms. Came aboard carrying great rolls of paper—blueprints—and he crossed half the United States bent over them. He’d draw and draw until it was time for dinner, then he’d gobble down his grub—speaking not a word—and go back to drawing.”

“I asked Neri what he was up to, and he said he’d been sent to supervise the electrification of San Francisco.”

Here, Jack Zapp stopped for effect, and threw his arms wide: “Electrification! The word gave me chills. So, I’d stop by, every trip up and down the train, and learn a little bit from Neri. He explained conduction, resistance, generation. The magic of the dynamo. He had a map of San Francisco, and he showed me the streets they were going to light up.”

I thought this was fascinating. I tend to assume nothing existed before 1998. Imagine learning that, a hundred years ago, the earth had no air and was entirely inhospitable to life. That’s what it was like to hear about a time before electricity.

“Well, I can’t explain it,” Jack Zapp said, “but it stuck in my head. We made it to California and Neri walked off the train carrying those blueprints like sacred scrolls. I headed back to St. Louis, but the thrill of it was gone. It was like Neri moved the magnet, and now I was the one being drawn.

“So I stepped off the train—it was August 8, 1879—and I shook the hand of the Pacific Railroad’s man in Alameda, collected my pay, and hopped a ferry to San Francisco. It was the first time my feet had touched ground in three years.”

This was the first time my feet had ever touched ground. Sure, simulated feet, simulated ground, but I’d take it.

“In the city, I asked a man to point me to Russian Hill, and I headed straight for it. Couldn’t stop for anything; I was like a man possessed. Finally, I took a cable car up into the fog—it was summertime—and when I got to the top, oh, you should have seen it.”

Jack Zapp stopped again, and stretched his arms even wider, as if presenting a panorama: “The lights were floating like a crown. Neri had done his work. Electric streetlights, all in a ring. It felt like the promised land. In that moment I knew I’d never return to the train. This was a new life. So I took out a nickel, the last of Jackman’s second chances, gave it a toss”—he pantomimed this—“and chose a new name for myself. Jack Zapp.”

There was a commotion in the street. The crowd ahead was stirring and seething; another moment, and I saw the reason. A middle-aged woman was crossing the plaza.

It was Mary.

I knew this because she looked like every painting of Mary ever made, all mashed-up and multiplied. Huge concentric halos radiated out from her face at perpendicular angles. Swirls of lights swept the street clear in front of her, and her footprints glowed gold behind her. An honor guard of half-transparent angels hovered around her in a box formation, hoisting harps and flaming swords.

At first she was just gazing beatifically forward, but then her head rocked slowly to one side, and her eyes swept across the crowd, and caught mine.

She was a computer program. She had to be. They wouldn’t let anyone play Mary. In World of Jesus, you were a baker or a fish-monger, not John or Judas. But that was a powerful gaze for a computer program. There were more polygons in Mary’s eyes than the rest of the plaza combined. I felt my processors burning. I glanced to the ground, and when I looked back, she had moved on, and the crowd was filling in the space she’d left behind.

“Don’t dawdle, Miss Nineteen,” Jack Zapp called back to me. “The Pool of Siloam awaits!”

We’d been walking for what felt like miles when I remembered that I could speak.

“Mr. Zapp,” I said—making my voice soft and trying to hold the computery modulation at bay—“what did you do after that?”

“Why, Miss Nineteen, I found a job,” he said. “Many jobs. I drove a milk cart. I ran a cable car. But I had my eye on electrification. Now, I knew I didn’t have it in me to be an engineer like Neri. I drank with him every Tuesday at the White Fang. Picked his brain, but there was just too much brain to pick.

“Then, one night, Neri told me a story. An old widow living up on Russian Hill, she’d had the electric lights installed, and when she turned them on, she heard her dead husband whispering:

“Elaine. Elaiiine.

“Sometimes you settle for a profession. Sometimes you reach for a profession. And sometimes, Miss Nineteen, you create a profession where none existed before.”

“I know just what you mean,” I said. “So what did you do?”

It was Jack Zapp and me walking in front now, with Scheme trailing behind; the three of us made an increasingly acute triangle.

“Why, I became the world’s first Electric Detective!”

I laughed. Jack Zapp’s enthusiasm was infectious. This had all happened more than a hundred years ago, and he was still so proud of himself.

“I found Elaine Fitzgerald’s house—it was dark, as she’d grown weary of the moaning and groaning—and I knocked on her front door and offered my services. By way of demonstration, she lit those electric lights, and sure enough, I heard it, too. A far-off voice saying: Elaine. Elaine. Elaine.

“I might add that Elaine Fitzgerald was not as old a widow as I had imagined. She was a lovely woman. And I gave her my pledge that I would not rest until her case was solved.”

“What then?”

“Well, I thought I should pay old Mr. Fitzgerald a visit. He was buried in a cemetery not far from the house, just down the slope of the hill. And do you know what I saw there?”

“Fresh earth above his grave?” I said. Just a guess.

“No, Miss Nineteen. The transmission line. It ran right up alongside the cemetery. Mr. Fitzgerald saw a way home, and he hopped aboard.”

Wow. The first internet.

“So, Elaine—Mrs. Fitzgerald—dug him up and moved him to the new graveyard over in the Presidio, and she heard not a peep thereafter. That was my first case.”

“Did you have many after that?”

“Dozens!” Jack Zapp said. “Hundreds. I developed a theory, Jack Zapp’s Theory of Electro-Phanto-Dynamics, backed it up with Jack Zapp’s Restless Pledge, and offered my services to clients in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and once, New York City.”

“How did you—” I trailed off. I didn’t know how to say it.

“How did I end up like this, you mean to ask,” Jack Zapp said. He frowned, and his mustache drooped lower. “Miss Nineteen, I will speak plainly.” He paused. “I bit off more than I could chew.”

The streets were all sloping down in the same direction now, dropping towards the corner of the city and, I imagined, the Pool of Siloam. For a moment, as Jack Zapp was telling his graveyard tale, I had the sense we were being followed. But I couldn’t see everywhere at once anymore, and when I turned my head, there was nothing.

“It was a demon in a dynamo,” Jack Zapp said. “One of Tesla’s new machines on Mission Street. Absolutely remarkable. Big as a house. Except it wouldn’t run. So naturally, the chairman of the board of Pacific Gas and Electric called on Jack Zapp, the Electric Detective, and I gave him my pledge...” His voice softened a bit. “And I failed. I crept into the station with my bifocal phanto-glass, and I saw it there—a dark shadowed thing with long arms and a face like a man. It was cradling the machine like a lover. But that’s about all I can tell you, because as soon as we locked eyes, I was cooked. Electrocuted—though wether by Tesla's forces or some darker cousin, I can't say. It was all dark fog for a long time, and then a lighter fog—and next I knew, I was walking the Embarcadero again. And now,” he said, “I intend to resume my investigation.”

Here, Jack Zapp paused and leveled his eyes at me. Brown eyes.

“I can sense something about you, Miss Nineteen. You understand my situation in a way that Miss Scheme does not.”

“I think I do,” I said, nodding.

“And we both find this place rather congenial, don’t we?”

The street was empty. I’d just noticed. Jerusalem’s banal bustle had broken down. Where did everybody go? Had the Sermon on the Mount started somewhere?

Two stars fell out of the sky.

UNESCAPED

They were angels, half-transparent like Mary’s escort, but not so taciturn. They streaked down out of the blue bowl and hit the ground like paratroopers, bright wings ballooned out behind them. These were assault angels.

There were no words and no warnings. They just began to hack at Jack Zapp, making bits of textured polygon fly and stick to the street and the stone walls. Little triangular flecks of suit and skin.

“Stop!” I yelled. “Stop!”

Jack Zapp was bent over and their flaming swords were falling across his back. These angels were programs like Mary, I could tell. It was code vs. ghost, and I was rooting for the ghost. He reached up to grab at one of the angel’s robes. It cut off his hand.

I was at the edge of the street, pressed up against a wall, half-hidden in shadows; I’d fled without realizing it.

Scheme was standing firm. She took a step forward. The angels turned, paused just a moment—then descended on her. The air was crosshatched with pale fire. She fell, and I saw blood, pure bright red, #FF0000 red.

“Scheme?” I whispered, then shouted, as if to wake her: “Scheme!” I wasn’t used to shouting, and I wasn’t used to being on my own, and I wasn’t used to Scheme being anything less than omnipotent. Everything about this was terrifying. I thought about logging out.

Then there was someone else in the street. The angels swiveled, slowly, to face a looming centurion with dark brown skin and cartoon-scale muscles. But he worked as swiftly as they did; he took a single galloping step forward and pushed his sword through the nearest angel’s body. It exploded in a spray of see-through pieces, like a popped balloon.

You’re not supposed to be able to do that in World of Jesus.

The centurion took another giant stride and pulled his sword across the second angel’s body. Another explosion; the pieces fell like confetti.

The centurion’s chest rose and fell in measured simulations of breath. He was truly gigantic. He had a crimson cape and a circular shield marked with a double eagle, but both looked comically small attached to his bulk. He spoke.

“Are you okay, Hu?”

The voice. It was Scheme!

“Those angels just attacked us out of nowhere,” I said. “They—where’s Jack Zapp?”

There was just a smear of texture in the street where he’d been.

“He got banned,” Scheme said. “Brutally. World of Jesus strikes without remorse if it decides you’re a bot.”

I looked up at the centurion, then down at Scheme’s other body, swimming in a small lake of Nintendo-red blood. “How did you…”

“That wasn’t me. It was Yung-fa in Guangdong. Just a precaution—against Jack Zapp, actually. Maybe I was wrong about him.”

“That sword…”

“Unescaped code. Very rare,” she said, sliding it back into its sheath, “and very expensive. Where was Jack Zapp taking us?”

“The Pool of Siloam. I think it’s this way.” I stepped out away from the wall, back into the sunlight, and pointed down the slope of the street. Scheme’s centurion looked me up and down.

“Nice dress,” she said. It now had a stain of triangles splashed across the skirt. “Although it's not how I imagine you.”

“You think of me as male?”

“Not exactly,” Scheme said. Her centurion smiled. Giant white teeth. She turned and set off down the street in huge loping strides.

She called back to me: “In my imagination, you’re a cat.”

THE POOL OF SILOAM

The Pool of Siloam was a wide rectangle of dark green water that rippled and reflected the sun in little curls of white fire. Broad, shallow steps led up from the pool into a sprawling terrace that was jam-packed with carts and tents and people all shouting and haggling.

I followed close behind Scheme’s centurion. There, near the pool, tucked under the shade of an olive tree—it was obviously our destination.

We knew that, in World of Jesus, Fadi Azer inhabited a character also named Fadi. What we did not know was that, in World of Jesus, Fadi’s character also sold falafel. The cart’s wooden sign said FALAFEL KING. Wow.

“Excuse me,” Scheme said to the cart’s attendant. He was the default character; he looked completely generic, like a hundred people we’d passed on the way here. Same face, same clothes.

“We’re looking for Fadi.”

“That is me,” the default character said. “I am Fadi. You want some falafel?”

Well.

“You’re Fadi,” Scheme repeated, “from the falafel shop in Fog City.”

“We are supposed to be role-playing,” Fadi frowned, and glanced around, as if there might be role-playing police patrolling the terrace. But then, in spite of himself, he smiled. “You know my shop? You are a customer?”

“I visited two days ago,” Scheme said. “I’m Annabel Scheme, the investigator.”

“Yes, of course! I am happy to see you,” Fadi said. He seemed unfazed by Scheme’s new skin. “I was worried about you after the police came. I did not know you played World of Jesus. You should have told me! I serve the Falafel King there, I serve the Falafel King here. You have not been getting falafel in Jerusalem from someone else, have you?”

“Fadi, where are you right now?”

“Easy. We are at the Pool of Siloam, great place to sell falafel, because—”

“No, I mean really—in the real world—where are you?”

“At the shop,” Fadi said. His voice was suddenly crackly, like a transmission from far away. “At my computer. It is a very good computer; Jad helped me build it, and I purchased a very fast—”

“Fadi,” Scheme interrupted, “I want you to really think, and be honest: Are you sure that’s where you are right now?”

He hesitated.

“No.” There was more static in his voice. “I am not sure of that.”

“So you’re not sure where you are,” Scheme said.

“No.”

There was a silence. I wished I could still whisper in Scheme’s ear, because I wanted to say: He’s dead, isn’t he.

“Well, listen,” Scheme said. “I’ll take two falafel.”

Fadi brightened and ran through a well-rendered simulation of falafel preparation. The oil actually bubbled and spat, and little bits of 3D chickpea floated to the surface.

“What’s the last thing you can remember doing,” Scheme asked, carefully casual, “back in Fog City?”

“Yesterday, I talk to Jad,” Fadi said. His voice was clearer now. “He is going to get me into the Grail-mail beta program, pretty cool. The man with the mustache stop by, doesn't say much, like always. Police come to the shop. Order some falafel, ask me some questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Oh, do I know this girl, such-and-such, brown hair.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, of course! Jenny from the building. Too skinny. Should eat more falafel.”

“What then?”

“Nothing. I close up, come here for a while. Then sleep, then I open the shop again, start mixing the falafel. Then, a big order! A delivery order. Biggest delivery ever.”

“Who ordered it? Where did you go?”

“Ha, where else? Only one place to go in Fog City!” Fadi beamed a smile at us. “Big delivery for Grail.”

Soon after that, the World of Jesus faded to black and the falafel shop’s back room appeared again through Scheme’s earrings. I turned my head to look around. Nothing happened. Then I remembered I couldn’t do that here.

“Fadi’s dead,” Scheme said, and it came out like a sigh. She stood up and rubbed her eyes, then switched off the monitor. His humble nest here in the back of the restaurant suddenly felt haunted.

Maybe he’s not dead, Scheme. Maybe he’s just...

Well, I couldn’t think of any alternatives.

Scheme shook her head. “I’ve never actually seen this before, but it makes sense. For the dead, these games are the perfect environment. They’re familiar. They disguise certain... differences. They probably don’t resist the way the real world does.”

What about Jack Zapp—is he okay?

“Well. Still dead. But otherwise, I imagine so. It’s just a game.”

I felt sad. Both because Fadi was dead and because we’d left World of Jesus. Looking through Scheme’s earrings, everything was just the way it had been before: splintered, flickering, overexposed. Ugh. I shut off the feed and thought of the Jerusalem sky.

“We’re going to Grail,” Scheme said, with a hard edge in her voice.

I brought the feed back up in time to see her walk out through the falafel shop’s sliding door, out into the swirling gray.

THE SHARD

Here’s the official story, straight from the Grail intranet: To choose the location for the Shard, Grail analyzed a century’s worth of climate data to pinpoint the single sunniest spot in downtown San Francisco. They put the building together like a Lego set—built it from a palette of just ten different tiny parts. The parts were made of steel and carbon and they could be snapped together in a hundred different ways. They were manufactured in China, and they came into the city by the boatload. The Shard went up, brick by brick, like the pyramids.

Then Grail wrapped the crenelated mass in smooth, curving crystalline panels. The panels gathered and conducted sunlight, then beamed it into the core of the building, where it became electricity. The electricity flowed down into motors that spun giant cylinders of solid gray bismuth—the Shard’s flywheel batteries. They were pure engineering elegance: they stored energy and fed it back into the Shard, and they served as gyroscopic counterweights to protect the building from earthquakes. In theory—and of course Grail modeled this—San Francisco could tip up like the deck of a sinking ship and the Shard would stay standing, pointed at the sky.

But now the sun didn’t shine on the Shard. The building still ran; Grailers came and went, and lights twinkled red, yellow, green and blue up and down its height. Where did the power come from? Were the flywheels still spinning? Was there a backup line to PG&E? A small nuclear reactor? The intranet did not specify.

Whatever it was, the Shard was an oasis of light and stability in the swirling weirdness of Fog City. It was the calm eye in the center of the storm. At least that’s how it seemed.

Standing there in the ground-floor lobby was like standing on the bulls-eye of a giant dart board, and people all over the world were flinging their questions and hopes and fears at you. They were projected in rainbow-colored letters two feet tall, racing across screens that covered the full curve of the back wall:

WHO WAS THE PRESIDENT IN 1997
WHO WAS PAUL KLEE
WHO WILL I MARRY

HOW TO KISS
HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR DNA

WHAT IS A GOOD CREDIT SCORE
WHAT IS A BANANA BOX
WHAT IS LOVE

WHAT IS THE BEST ELECTRIC CAR
WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF GOAT FLU
WHAT DO MEN WANT

WHY DID CHINA BAN COMPUTERS
WHY DOES MY EYE TWITCH
WHY DO WE DREAM

It felt like home. Behind it all, chiseled into a slab of jet-black carbon, was Grail’s mission statement:

TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD'S DREAMS AND DESIRES AND MAKE THEM A REALITY

The girl at the front desk was obviously playing a video game.

“Welcome to Grail,” she said, shuffling windows on her screen. “How can I, uh. How can I help you.” Apparently they didn’t get many visitors here.

Scheme pulled a wide laminated card out of her pocket. It had her picture on it. “Annabel Scheme. Licensed search investigator. Following up on an anomaly.”

The girl looked blank. Her jumpsuit only had three merit badges. One of them was a bright-yellow smiley face.

“You have to scan that,” Scheme said, nudging the card closer. The girl’s mouth made a shape like oh and she waved the card across the surface of the desk. It made a soft plink.

“Wow,” she said, looking at her screen, “you’ve been here a lot.”

Scheme nodded. “You guys have a lot of problems.”

“So, go ahead. The search anomaly team is on the—”

“Thirteenth floor,” Scheme said. “I know.”

In the elevator, Scheme did not press the button for the thirteenth floor. Instead she pressed the button marked B6. That was the floor to which Fadi had made his biggest-ever delivery. It was the Shard’s deepest basement.

How often do you come here, Scheme?

“Less often now,” she said. “And as little as possible. I’m trying to stay away. But it’s like a magnet.”

I’d heard that before.

The elevator doors swished open and Scheme stepped out into a space so wide-open it seemed for a moment we were back out on the street. The floor stretched out like a football field. Harsh light, not intended for humans, glared down from a low ceiling.

It was a giant grid of trash. Plastic dumpsters on knobby black wheels were lined up in a yawning matrix. Hundreds of them. They were bright primary colors, and they made a spectrum. Closest to the elevator were a dozen rows of red dumpsters, each one overflowing with paper and cardboard. Orange was next, full of glass, green and brown and clear. My camera-eyes couldn’t tell what the rest of the rainbow held.

Overhead, there was a series of tubes that poked down, ran just below the ceiling, merged and split and finally opened up, one tube above each dumpster. Every few seconds, there was a rattling over-ture and a piece of trash shot out, perfectly sorted: a crumpled box, a half-empty cup, an old hard drive trailing wires.

The Shard definitely separated its recyclables.

“Guhhh,” Scheme groaned. Her hand flew up to her face. “Smells terrible. It’s—this whole floor is trash.”

There were narrow channels between the dumpsters, and Scheme edged deeper into the matrix. Yellow was electronics. The dumpsters were full of burnt-out circuit boards and hard drives and cooling fans. I saw a whole Grail server chassis. Eep.

Green was compost. There were half-empty smoothies and unraveled sushi rolls, blobs of pudding and splashes of pea soup. Lots of pea soup. Nobody liked the pea soup.

Scheme stalked down the row of green dumpsters, reaching up on tip-toe and peeking into each one in turn. The full diversity of organic matter was on display here, presented in every state of decomposition. I took notes in case Scheme later exhibited an allergic reaction or showed signs of salmonella.

And there, in a long dumpster at the very end of the row, were two huge plates piled high with falafel, hummus, and green-black tabbouleh. They were wrapped tight with transparent plastic. I was afraid the next thing I’d see would be Fadi’s stiff reaching fingers or his cold unblinking eyes. But it was just the plates. They hadn’t come down a tube; they had been set here, neatly, by human hands.

“What happened to you?” Scheme murmured. She poked at the plastic wrap with a finger. “Where did you go?”

Back in the elevator, I expected her to take us back to the lobby. Instead, she pushed the button for the forty-seventh floor.

Where are we going, Scheme?

“To see an old friend,” she said.

SEBDEX

The elevator had walls of glass, and above ground it ran along the outer surface of the Shard. I watched the rest of Fog City fade from outline to suggestion to—nothing. Dimensionless gray. Scheme’s face was reflected in the glass, lit up evenly like a 3D model. Her mouth was set tight.

The elevator chirped as it passed each floor. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. Chirp, chirp chirp. Twenty-three.

“That was my floor.”

What?

“When I worked here,” Scheme said. “I got off at the twenty-third floor every day.”

What did you do?

“Not much. Design, supposedly. Mostly I got mad about things and took long lunch breaks.”

That’s hard to imagine.

“I was a different person,” she said. “You should have seen how I dressed. It was embarrassing.”

Chirp. Forty-seven. The doors swished open. Scheme stepped out into a small, shadowed antechamber.

There was data projected on the walls, just as in the lobby, but here it was more than just queries. There was a real-time accounting of Grail’s income, penny by micropenny. There was a map of the Shard, floor by floor, with rainbow dots migrating like ants. There was a giant corporate to-do list, with items blinking off and on every millisecond. Hey—I used to read that to-do list.

There was also a receptionist, a skinny kid with a long nose who looked up as the elevator doors opened, and then looked down again immediately. I recognized him. It was Jad, the Grailer from Fadi’s shop.

“You,” Scheme said. “You work for him?”

“Sebdex is expecting you,” Jad said evenly, looking down at his own lap. The circles under his eyes looked even deeper and darker in the low light; the effect was skeletal.

“Of course he is,” Scheme said. She swooped in close, and Jad lurched back. In a low hiss, she said: “Piece of advice. Quit.”

Scheme stepped past his desk, through a short corridor, and out into the circle of the forty-seventh floor. It was wide-open but not that wide across; we were close to the Shard’s sharp peak. The walls were all glass, and weak silvery light pressed in from outside.

On the far side of the floor, there was a cluster of tables—just raw spans of shiny material pitched across sawhorses—each supporting two or three monitors that glowed in the gloom. Seated at one of the tables, there was a man. When Scheme stepped out of the elevator, he straightened, but didn’t turn.

“It’s been a while, Bel,” he said. His voice was raspy but it carried across the floor. He was silhouetted against the gray glow. His head was completely smooth, and his ears stuck out like antennae.

Scheme set out across the floor. Three steps in, the man raised a hand and said: “Stop.” It came like the crack of a whip—a whip with a bunch of rattling, dried-up old bones tied to the end of it. Then, more gently: “Don’t step there.”

The floor was marked with white chalk; spidery lines traced out a circular maze. Cables snaked into the maze, ran through the curving channels, and converged in the center, where there was a white plastic cylinder, about the size of a blender. The quantum computer. There were still traces of yellow foam.

“Come around.”

His given name was Sebastian Dexter, but the whole world called him something different. I knew the other name better than most, because it was all over my source code. Like a surgeon who stitches his name into your heart: Sebdex.

That had been his handle from the age of thirteen, ever since his first encounter with a BBS, discovered two area codes away in back-road Kentucky and dialed furtively in deepest night. (Every magazine profile started with that BBS. The phone call that transformed the kid with nothing into, eventually, the man with everything.) Sebdex was Grail. He wrote its first spider and set it loose on the web. He wrote the first algorithms that could sense subtle threads of authority in a document. And he wrote the code that allows me to write this. Grail’s ticker symbol wasn’t GRAIL. It was SBDX. For him, one name was enough, like Sting or Prince or Bono or Frodo. He was Sebdex, just Sebdex, only Sebdex.

But there was apparently at least one person in the world who refused to use his nom de net.

“Sebastian,” Scheme said. “What the hell is this?”

“Why are you here,” he asked, flatly. He didn’t look up.

“Why is that here,” Scheme said, poking her chin at the quantum computer in the center of the floor.

“It belongs to me. And it won’t be here long.” He was still absorbed in his screens. The data projected around Jad’s desk was displayed here, too. “My project is almost finished.”

“I’ve met that banana box before,” Scheme said. “I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now.”

Sebdex sighed and bowed his head a little. “Jennifer Halais was, obviously, not supposed to have it. She stole it, Bel, and I should have said this already. But. Thank you for finding it.”

I had a closer view of Sebdex’s profile now. Some features I recognized from pictures: Bright green eyes. Cheekbones that jutted out, sharp-edged, from his face. He could have been handsome. But he wasn’t bald in pictures. And the rest of him was— wrong. He sat in his chair at a strange angle, and his neck seemed squashed, as if he was missing vertebrae. Some of his joints didn’t line up exactly right—shoulders and wrists. Maybe he had a disease. (The magazine profiles didn’t say anything about a disease.)

“And Fadi,” Scheme said. She was unfazed by his appearance, and her arms were crossed tight. “What about him?”

Sebdex said nothing. A rattling sound came from his chest.

“You’re a nano-manager, Sebastian, and it means you get all the credit,” Scheme said, picking up steam, “but it also means you get all the blame. If a man named Fadi Azer came into this building and never walked out”—she was almost shouting now, stabbing a finger at him—“you know exactly what happened to him.”

“People go pop in the fog all the time,” Sebdex said evenly. “Anything could have happened to your friend. Anything or nothing. Trust me.” He turned to face us.

He was missing an eye.

Scheme’s hand went up in front of her mouth. “Sebastian,” she breathed. “You didn’t.”

I couldn’t look away. It was a gaping dark pit. My video software was screaming ANOMALY! ANOMALY! because it was so weird, and so asymmetrical, and so black.

“I figured it out, Bel. I have a plan.”

“You promised you’d stop,” Scheme said.

“But I figured it out.”

“You lied.” Her voice was hard. “What are you doing? What are you doing here?”

Sebdex shook his head, and it turned on a crazy angle, more up-and-down than side-to-side. “It’s going to make everything worth it.” He looked at her evenly with his one bright green eye. “Everything, I promise.”

Scheme stepped quickly through the ground-floor lobby, but not too quickly for me to see one wall lit up with all the questions I’d just been flinging at Grail:

SEBDEX DISEASE NEWS
EYE (CANCER OR FUNGUS)
ANNABEL SCHEME GRAIL
ANNABEL SCHEME SEBASTIAN DEXTER

Note to self: use a different search engine. In another millisecond, the questions scrolled out of sight. There were no answers. Not yet.

“Fadi’s dead,” Scheme said, jogging back to where we’d parked, “and Sebastian did it. I can’t believe it—but he did. Sebastian. Sebastian!” A little growl rose in her throat, and she banged a parking meter with her palm as we passed it.

What are we doing now?

”You need to double-check, triple-check, every firewall you’ve got. Get more. Get something good from one of those gangsters.”

She found the car. I checked the time. Outside Fog City, the sun was on its way down.

Where are we going, Scheme?

“We’re going back to school.”

SUTRO'S SCEPTER

We came tearing up Market Street, buzzing and whining on the steep incline. I couldn’t pull myself away from the view out of Scheme’s left earring: all of San Francisco was laid out and lit up, sharp and vivid and three-dimensional. Fog City rose near the bay and the bridge, a big fuzzy bar of negative space.

Based on our vector up the hill, along with Scheme’s cryptic directive, I’d guessed where we were going:

Cal Sutro.

Satellite snapshots showed the University of California at Sutro’s Scepter as a cluster of concrete buildings clinging to the upper slope of the Hill of the Holy Spirit, the third-tallest peak in San Francisco. Open Britannica told me it began as an extension of the University of California at Berkeley in 1961 and became its own independent institution in 1979. Then it closed, suddenly, in 1997.

Looming over the campus, just beyond the soccer fields, was Sutro’s Scepter, the giant radio antenna and art project that was San Francisco’s icon and its eyesore. It was generally reviled, and when Grail built the Shard, people were relieved; at last, there was something new to put on souvenir mugs and commemorative tea kettles. But now, Sutro’s Scepter and Fog City rose like the two great tines of a city-sized tuning fork of weirdness. San Francisco just couldn’t catch a break.

We roared up a dark access road, rolled into an empty parking lot and came to a sparking halt. Scheme reached into the back seat for her messenger bag. She’d cooled down a little.

It was an ugly campus. An online photo gallery called it “Le Corbusier’s California Adventure.” The buildings were monochrome and featureless except for tall slotted windows. No two were on the same level; between buildings it was all steps and terraces.

“This is depressing,” Scheme said. She was hiking up away from the parking lot, plotting a steep course past the empty buildings. “They shut it down just after we graduated.”

I tried to imagine Scheme as an undergraduate. I couldn’t. We came to a wide terrace with a view of the entire campus.

“There,” she said, pointing a long finger towards one of the concrete blocks. “That was my dorm. Second floor. 206 Wozniak.” It was perched on a ledge, its back half pitched out into the air. It looked precarious.

Scheme, what does this have to do with Sebdex?

“Sebastian went here, too,” she said, back on the steps, breathing hard. “We were friends. Good friends.”

That wasn’t in the magazine profiles. In fact, education was a notable omission from his rags-to-riches story; nobody ever mentioned where Sebdex went to school. I assumed he didn’t. I assumed he taught himself combinatorics on the back of a shovel.

We came to the end of the steps but Scheme didn’t break her stride, wading straight into the hilltop scrub. And she wasn’t the first one to do it; I could see a faint track that wound up the hill, towards a dark tree line and, beyond, the tall twisted silhouette of Sutro’s Scepter.

“Hu, I need you to listen to me up here,” Scheme said. “Do exactly what I tell you, and don’t go exploring on your own. Don’t connect to anything unless I tell you to.”

Of course, Scheme, but—

“I’m serious. I don’t want to lose you. And if you disobey, I might.”

Of course.

The wind was whistling across the Hill of the Holy Spirit.

There was a wide, fenced-in disc of gravel and weedy grass, and in the center, Sutro’s Scepter rose out of the rocky ground. It was built from three massive steel pillars that twisted closer together as they reached higher, bound together along the way by a spider-webbing of catwalks and cross-beams. There were bright lights spaced along its length, all blinking blood-red. At the top of the Scepter, the pillars flared out again like three thorns, cradling an exploding bird’s-nest of antennas.

“Freezing up here,” Scheme said. “Always was.” Her hair was whipping like a red banner.

A triangular section of the fence had been cut and peeled back—years ago?—so she ducked down and stepped through. There, at the base of the Scepter, she bent over her bag and pulled out a thin black laptop, barely bigger than a sheet of paper. I was afraid it would blow away in the wind.

“My fingers are numb,” she said, fumbling with the keys. “Go ahead and give it a sniff, Hu.”

There was a wifi network here on the hilltop. Amazing. It was called UCSS-experimental. It was too weak to connect.

“Same here,” Scheme said. “Shit.” She craned her neck back. “We’ll go to the first landing.”

Up we went, rung by rung, Scheme’s hands almost blue against the dark steel of the Scepter. I couldn’t believe the view; I could see all the way from the Pacific across to the dark glittering bay. I could see the shrapnel of the Golden Gate Bridge. I could see Scheme’s house from here.

“Ugh,” she grunted, pulling herself up onto the first tiny landing, forty feet off the ground. It was just a flat, triangular platform, featureless except for the place where it met the pillar, where there was a tiny row of industrial-looking ports and outlets framed by scorch marks.

“We used to come here all the time,” Scheme said, sitting down. “Sebastian and me. To study.”

To study.

“Lots of studying. We discovered that the Scepter wasn’t just broadcasting radio stations. There were other signals, too. Signals from strange places. Try the network now.”

Success. I was now connected to the internet—or some other net—and Scheme was, too.

“So listen,” she said. “Seriously. Only go where I tell you.”

Where to, then?

Scheme sat back, bracing her spine against the dark bulk of the pillar. “Doctor Faustus.”

TRANSACTIONS

That was doctorfaust.us and it looked like something from 1999, with the logo spelled out in a bouncy cartoon font. It was an auction site, laid out like eBay, with rainbow-colored listings in different categories and little ticking clocks all over the place.

Except these were very strange listings.

MY LEFT ARM
MY RIGHT ARM
MY LEFT KIDNEY

At first I thought it might be a secret market for buying and selling body parts—and if that was the case, it was probably being run out of Locust Grove—but no, there was more:

THE MEMORY OF MY FIRST KISS
MY ABILITY TO ENJOY WINE
MY FIRST LANGUAGE

Scheme, what is this place?

“Pretty simple, Hu,” she said, typing into the search box. “It’s eBay for the good stuff. The sellers are stupid people. The buyers are demons. Old idea. New tool.” Her screen flashed and I saw a familiar handle. Sebdex.

“Jesus, Sebastian,” Scheme breathed. “No.” She was scrolling through his profile, his transaction history. It was a very long history. “You promised you’d stop.”

Scheme, what do sellers get in return here?

“Depends,” she murmured. “Sometimes money. Sometimes you get a better body. Get smarter. Or you get the guy you want. The job you want. Of course, you’ve got to be willing to give something up in return.”

I loaded the section of the site labeled KIDS.

MY FIRST-BORN CHILD
MY SECOND-BORN CHILD
ALL MY CHILDREN, AND MY CHILDREN'S CHILDREN

It went on and on.

On Scheme’s screen, Sebdex’s transaction history read like an anatomy textbook cross-faded with a curriculum vitae. Fourteen years ago, the first listing:

MY LEFT PINKIE TOENAIL

In return, he aced his thermodynamics final.

“I can confirm,” Scheme said, “that nothing ever grew on that toe again. He’d show it off like a trophy. Fucking Sebastian.”

Twelve years ago:

MY MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD

“He wanted to get rid of those anyway,” Scheme said. “They weren’t good memories.”

In return he—oh. Wow. In return he got Grail.

You knew him then, Scheme?

“I was looking over his shoulder when he posted it,” she said, and sighed. The wind was blowing harder now. The list continued:

MY HAIR
MY T-CELLS
MY SENSE OF HUMOR

What did Sebdex get in exchange for his laughter?

Quantum computation.

So the great breakthrough—Grail’s great magic, the thing that scarred San Francisco, created Fog City, almost killed the Beekeeper—was a reward from a demon called Thrall, whose user icon was a horned goat-head with nuclear hazard symbols for eyes.

“That’s when I left,” Scheme said. “When he did that. I told him not to. I screamed at him.”

Recently, Sebdex’s seller ratings had been getting worse. For most of his history, it was all five stars—“A+ would do business again” from a whole host of different demons—but starting six years ago, complaints had been cropping up.

“Too slow with payment,” wrote KingSorrow. Three stars.

“Memories not as rich as promised,” wrote Asura83. Two stars.

“Misrepresented health of soul,” wrote CocytusKid. One star.

A week ago, Sebdex offered:

MY RIGHT EYE

“Demons love eyes for some reason,” Scheme sighed.

Maybe they’re preternaturally delicious. Like Fadi’s falafels.

She made a little heh sound. “I’m glad you’re able to find some levity in the single saddest website that anyone has ever created.”

Who did create this, Scheme?

“I have no idea,” she said. “And trust me, we tried to cook up an interdimensional whois. Well, Sebastian did. He used to have a whole server set up here”—she patted her palm on the landing—“and a cable that ran through the woods. But Ethernet didn’t go that far, so he had to build little repeater stations every so often, and squirrels would always turn them into nests and chew through—” She caught herself. The smile that had been growing on her face vanished. “The point is, I have no idea. But I feel sorry for every single person who’s ever found it.”

In exchange for his eye, Sebdex had stated simply: “I want my quantum computer back.”

“No,” Scheme said. “No, no, no.”

Scheme, were we part of this?

“No. Just a coincidence. Fucking. Sebastian.”

Finally, we came to Sebdex’s most recent offer. It was brand new, posted last night. The offer:

THE SOUL OF FADI AZER

Sebdex had come a long way from his left pinkie toenail. There was a little animated fire icon next to the listing; apparently, Fadi’s soul was a hot commodity. The reward was simple. Sebdex wrote: “I want to live in the best of all possible worlds.” A demon named AngelusNovus had agreed to the trade. Its icon was a cartoon face with curly hair.

Scheme didn’t speak. She was scowling, and her lips curled up as if she’d smelled something terrible.

Scheme, can he do that? Sell Fadi’s soul?

“You can offer whatever you want, if you can get your hands on it,” she said. She slammed her laptop shut. “Let’s go.”

Far below, the streets were sparkling in the deepening blue of dusk. Here on the hilltop, the dark trees were bending in the wind.

There was a man in the woods.

Scheme—

Beyond the fence, just at the edge of the treeline. A dark outline, just barely darker than the scratchy darkness surrounding it. An outline with the suggestion of a jacket and a strange hat.

Scheme. Jack Zapp is here.

“What?”

He’s on the path. Just inside the trees.

“I don’t see anything,” she said, squinting. I turned my eyes up, all the way to maximum sensitivity, until San Francisco was burning like the surface of the sun and the woods were a field of blue-green fuzz—and I could see him clearly. He was walking out in the open, coming towards the Scepter.

He’s coming, Scheme. I don’t know how he got here, but he’s coming.

“I still don’t see anything,” she said.

He was like a dog that wouldn’t stop following us. A dead dog. He came through the fence—walked straight through it—and I could see him on normal settings now. He was mostly transparent. His jacket was in tatters and he had cuts on his hands and head. Apparently it wasn’t just a game for Jack Zapp.

He stopped just inside the fence and looked up at the Scepter. I zoomed in on his face; the expression there was sad and puzzled. Something was different. I didn’t like it.

Then he disappeared.

Scheme swung out onto the ladder. The wind was wailing; it tore at her coat and roared in my ears.

Scheme, what if he’s waiting for us down there?

“Then it’s a good trap,” she said, “because there’s no place to go but down there.” Down she went, rung by rung, back to the surface of planet earth.

STUDIO S/A

We were almost to the bottom when, on a hunch, I connected to the wavering UCSS-experimental network and loaded up Doctor Faustus again.

There, on the front page. The most recent listing, demonstrating the efficiency of the market, had been accepted in seconds.

The seller, JackZapp79.

The buyer, DarkLordBaal.

The offer:

THE SOUL OF SHERRINGFORD JACKMAN

The reward—oh. He wrote, “I, Jack Zapp, the Electric Detective, in order to fulfill Jack Zapp’s Restless Pledge, require the power to defeat the demon that killed me.”

Scheme. I think we should go faster.

She plunged forward. The Scepter’s blinking red lights cast her shadow lower and longer as she jogged away, and then we were in the trees, Scheme feeling her way along the thin track. The trees were a screen of shifting black and gray. I was blind.

She cried out, and there was a loud rustle and a crash.

Scheme?

“It’s okay,” she said. “I tripped.” I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear her moving in the darkness. “Oh, wow,” she breathed. “I can’t believe it.”

We were back in the safety of the Tata, under the protective glow of its dome light. Scheme had a dark box in her lap—whatever she’d tripped over in the woods. It was a squat metal thing, filthy and corroded, with ports on the back. There was a cable plugged into one of them that ran for three inches before unraveling into wires and tatters. The box had a ragged hole in the side, and pine needles spilled out. “One of Sebastian’s repeaters,” she said, wiggling a finger inside. “I’m glad somebody got some use out of it.”

She turned it over, and on the bottom I saw, stenciled in bright yellow paint, now worn and faded:

Scheme ran a palm over it, clearing some of the dirt. “I painted this,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “I thought we were going to graduate and start a company, just the two of us. Design things.” I could see her face in the rear-view mirror. It was still pale and raw from the cold. There were bits of twig and leaf stuck in her hair. “Maybe get a dog.”

Something landed on the Tata’s hood with a crash that shook the whole car’s frame, and then I saw, leering through the windshield, the face of Jack Zapp, his mustache bristling above a brand-new mouth, a mouth bursting with curved black teeth.

Scheme put the Tata in reverse, stomped on the accelerator, and buzzed backwards through the empty lot. Monstrous, lion-jawed Jack Zapp slid off the hood and fell onto the concrete, where he stood and reared back, wings at full extension.

Oh. He has wings now.

Scheme dropped the car into drive and gunned forward. Jack Zapp was lit up in the headlights. His new additions were multiple-jointed mechanical things, webbed with spidery latticework just like Sutro’s Scepter. He was solid now, not ghostly-transparent, and his jacket was pulled tight around a body that was stretched and swollen. The skin that was visible—his hands, his neck, his face—was dark and fibrous, like ragged rubber. His teeth were black daggers, and his eyes—his eyes were missing.

Scheme aimed right for him, but at the last moment he leapt up into the air and didn’t come down. She slammed on the brakes.

“Shit.”

The dome light was still on. She reached up and flicked it off. Then she pulled the car around and made the motor spit plasma.

We were hurtling back down Market Street; the streets below burned orange in the gathering night. My eyes were turned all the way up and the world was a riot of noisy hissing pixels. Every few seconds, I caught a shape crossing the sky behind us.

Scheme, Jack Zapp found Doctor Faustus. And he made a trade.

“Jesus. What for?”

He wanted to be as powerful as a demon.

“That’s it? No details?” We ran a stoplight and it washed over Scheme’s face in a blood-red bar. She grimaced. “He should have read the terms of service.”

I had every piece of pattern-recognition software I possessed scanning the sky around us, all set to maximum sensitivity. They were beeping and clanging and telling me we were surrounded by giant squid and Woodrow Wilson and passages from Hamlet.

I felt completely overwhelmed. Fadi was dead. The founder of the world’s most important internet company had initiated a sweeping transaction around a murdered soul. An undead detective from the 19th century had just been transformed into a winged marauder. I wanted to go back to Jerusalem. Or at least back to the Panhandle.

Scheme, I haven’t seen Jack Zapp in a while. I think we lost him.

She slowed down a little as Market Street flattened out and started to obey traffic signals. “If I had to guess,” she said, “I’d say he was headed back to Fog City.”

That’s a relief.

“Unfortunately, so are we.”

Back up there on the Scepter, Scheme had warned me not to connect to any other sites, and I hadn’t, even though I’d felt them out there, waves of pings washing over me—greetings, invitations, promises. I’d ignored them all. But she hadn’t said anything about looking at other user profiles on Doctor Faustus. So, just before Jack Zapp showed up, I did.

I searched for a user named Annabel Scheme.

And there she was. Her history listed just three transactions, all fifteen years ago—all before Sebdex had even registered his account. Just three; there hadn’t been any after that.

The offers were small, silly things: the mastery of a dance move she’d spend weeks perfecting; a sexy memory from the summer before senior year; a tenuous friendship with a girl in her dorm.

The rewards were silly, too—silly and vain:

“I want to be two inches taller.”

“I want red hair.”

But then, the third one. Oh, Scheme:

“I want Sebastian Dexter to notice me.”

TERMS OF SERVICE

The streets were crowded. Buses whined and belched sparks. Bikes clogged the intersections, blinkers all bobbing and flashing like a swarm of fireflies.

“Hu, call Nelson at the Black Danube,” Scheme said.

The phone rang, burbling, amplified on the Tata’s speakers.

“Hullo,” Nelson answered, voice crackling. I could hear the clatter of cups in the background.

“Nelson,” Scheme said. “It’s Annabel. I need a favor, fast. I need you to read some terms of service.”

“Are you starting a new site? Octav’s going to flip out—”

“No. You’re looking for a loophole.” Her face was a grim mask. “We need to find a loophole.”

“Ah. Right. And this must be, uh, bone-chillingly urgent.”

The Doctor Faustus terms of service were already in his inbox; I’d sent them through a Locust Grove email server. No Grail-mail. Scheme clicked the connection closed, stomped the accelerator and started running red lights again.

“Hu,” she said, “rule number—what rule are we on?”

Fourteen.

“Rule number fourteen: Don’t ever, ever do deals with demons.”

The Black Danube was buzzing, thick with petitioners. Scheme went straight for the espresso counter, straight for Nelson.

“There is some weird shit in these terms,” he said, waving at the cash register’s screen, now co-opted for legal analysis. “I told you, I didn’t take that course—”

“Now you see there’s a market for interdimensional law!” Scheme said. “Show me a loophole.”

Nelson sighed and leaned into the screen, scrolling. “So, some of it is standard. ‘You grant us a non-exclusive, royal-ty-free license to use, copy, reproduce, display and distribute your content in all universes.’ Although I get the sense that when they say ‘all universes’ they really mean it.”

Scheme nodded gravely.

“Right. Then there’s this,” he said, still scrolling, eyes scanning back and forth. “The clause for force majeure. You know what that is? An act of god—like if I agree to make you a latte and then the cafe burns down. You can’t sue me. For the latte.”

Scheme cocked an eyebrow.

“Lame example. Anyway—”

I saw a dark shape approaching. Its eyes were burning, its mouth set firm, its headphones enormous. It was Kerry Chakrabarty.

“You!” he shrieked, rounding the end of the counter. “I give you a tip, and you screw me over?” He was barreling towards us, and I had a feeling he might not stop. “You spam me, you shut down my biggest traffic driver of the year, you talk shit about me to Octav—”

Scheme held up her hands. “Kerry! I didn’t talk—”

The front window exploded and through the mist of glass came the massive form of Jack Zapp. He crashed through the espresso counter and into the chalkboard behind it, taking Kerry Chakrabarty with him.

“—shit,” Scheme finished. She dropped her hands and ran for the door. At the threshold, she stopped, turned, and waved to Nelson: “Come on!”

He swiveled on his butt across the top of the counter, dropped to the floor, and scuttled towards us. Behind the ruined chalkboard, Jack Zapp 2.0 was rampaging through the Black Danube, upending tables and sending laptops flying. Entrepreneurs were shrieking and fainting.

Outside, the sun had dropped out of the sky and night was rising. Scheme sprinted for the Tata. Behind us, I heard an inflected bellow—it could only be Octav Erdos—and the thwack, thwack of a gun. More shrieks.

“Should, uh, should we just leave them?” Nelson said.

“Don’t worry about Octav,” Scheme said. She slid into the car. “He’s from Hungary. He knows how to handle monsters.”

“What was that thing?”

“Ghost in a new body,” Scheme said. Ho hum. She pulled away into the shadowed street. “Did you see him move? Like a big baby. He doesn’t know how to drive it yet.”

“Is this what you’ve been doing since you left the Black Danube?” Nelson said. He was folded up in the passenger seat, knees against the dashboard. He was still wearing his apron. “Hanging out with demons and monsters?”

Scheme nodded, looking straight ahead.

“I always thought you went into private equity.”

Scheme dug in her pocket and tossed Nelson her phone. It had the Doctor Faustus terms of service loaded up on its tiny screen. “You were saying,” she said.

“Right,” Nelson said. “Force majeure. That’s pretty standard. But here”—he was pinching his thumbs together, struggling to make the phone work—“they provide a second clause, not only for force majeure but also for—it says force diabolique. The act of, I guess, a powerful demon. That’s, uh. Nonstandard.” His eyes flicked up to look at Scheme.

She was silent. Going through an inventory of demon friends, I assumed.

“When I left Grail and did not go into private equity,” she said finally, “I found a teacher.”

She pulled out onto the Embarcadero. Up ahead, the gray column of Fog City rose and intersected the black bar of the Bay Bridge to form a giant cross that cut the sky into indigo quarters.

“And I think she can help us.”

CARLOTTA

Scheme skirted Fog City, keeping the wall of gray on our left. The fog was more active than before—it was less a wall and more a waterfall, tumbling in slow-motion. It had been a while since I checked the feeds.

Scheme, you should know, Grail’s not working. Everyone is complaining. You ask a question and don’t get anything back. It’s a black hole.

She made a low hmmm sound in her throat.

The Embarcadero was a wide street lined with palm trees that curved around the eastern edge of the city. Farther north, it was all sun and soup-in-a-breadbowl. Here, it ran like an alley between the gray boundary of Fog City and the black expanse of the bay. The Tata was the only car on the road.

Long, lonely piers stretched out into the water. Some were just ruins—half-submerged or reduced to skeletal pylons. Others still showed signs of habitation: rusty scooters parked in front, orange lights flickering through dirty glass.

Scheme pulled off the street into a narrow gravel lot. Outside the car, I could hear the lapping of the water. The bridge was almost directly above us; I traced it across the sky to it waypoint on Blood Island, then over to the glittering lights of Oakland, Alameda and the New Fleet.

Where the lot ended, there was a single skinny pier that stuck out into the bay. At the end of the pier there was a tugboat. It was short and squat, with a bulky cabin and a stubby round conning tower. The portholes were all decorated with dark curtains; it looked vaguely domestic, but also quite derelict.

“This is it,” Scheme said.

This is what?

“Her home.”

“Someone lives out there?” Nelson said. It was nice having someone else along to share the burden of incredulity.

“Her name is Carlotta,” Scheme said. “She was my teacher for a little while. She can help us.”

“Oh,” Nelson said. “Good.” It came out like a squeak.

Scheme took one step out onto the pier, and as her toe touched the first creaking plank, a light came on aboard the tugboat. It was a blue-green glow peeking out from behind the curtains.

Scheme turned back to Nelson. “I have to go alone,” she said. “That’s the rule.” She lifted each heel in turn, pulled off her shoes—simple black dance flats—and lined them up neatly. Then she jogged lightly down the pier towards the tugboat. Her feet flashed pure white against the dark, damp wood.

“I’ll just, ah, wait here,” Nelson called after us.

At the end of the pier, Scheme reached out to steady herself against the tugboat’s hull, then hopped over and in.

It was possible she had gone crazy. I reviewed my notes; she’d accumulated an awful lot of trauma points today. Also, there was the part where we connected to an interdimensional marketplace for souls and she found out that her ex-boyfriend had just traded a murdered merchant for some kind of world peace. There was that.

Back behind us, across the street, Fog City was churning like a soup set to simmer. And all across the internet, people were howling like it was the end of the world, because they couldn’t find anything. They were casting their questions into Grail, over and over, and nothing was coming back. Like coins down a wishing well.

The tugboat clanked against the pier in time with the waves, a slow metronome. Clank. Clank. Clank. Everything was quiet. Scheme rapped three times on the cabin door.

The door opened smoothly and standing inside was not a shrouded crone or a moss-haired monster, as I had expected. Rather, it was a young woman—younger than Scheme—with hair so blonde it was almost white. She was wearing snug jeans and a light blue work shirt, too big for her, sleeves rolled up around her elbows. Practical clothes. This was Carlotta.

“Annabel,” she said, without surprise—and without affection. Her eyes were cool and bright, bright blue.

“Hi, Carlotta,” Scheme said. “I’m sorry I haven’t visited sooner.”

The cabin was everything that Carlotta wasn’t. The walls were cracked and dripping with mold; dark water pooled on the floor. There were books stacked on shelves built into the wall, but they seemed to have decomposed and fused into a single bibliographic mass. An oil lamp, set on a low table that was also built in, was the source of the blue-green light. It made the whole cabin look like the belly of some giant sea creature. Some giant sea creature with a terrible disease.

I was glad I couldn’t smell it.

Carlotta sat lightly on a low bench next to the galley, which was also disgusting. She looked digitally composited into the scene around her, as if she was lit by the autumn sun, not that gross lamp. Like Scheme, she was barefoot.

“You should be sorry,” Carlotta said. “We’re not finished.”

Scheme nodded. I’d never seen her so meek. “I’ve been busy.”

“Too busy to learn things that make all that”—she waved a hand towards the city, towards Fog City—“look like children playing in a sandbox. You could be very powerful, Annabel.”

Scheme made no motion to sit; she didn’t even take another step into the cabin. “About that,” she said.

Carlotta smiled—a creeping, curling smile. “You need my help.”

Scheme nodded. “Someone I know made a deal with a demon.”

“It’s him, of course,” Carlotta said. “Your old boyfriend.”

Scheme was silent. I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: a row of easels set up at the far end of the cabin, at the tugboat’s helm, each with a painting in progress. They showed scenes of the city from various waterborne vantage points. They were classic post-card views, painted in cheery colors—except that each had a different skyline. One had the Shard as the focal point. Another was missing the Shard, but had a huge golden cylinder instead. A third showed a tall tower pointed like a pyramid.

“Of course I’ll help you,” Carlotta said, and her smile turned sweeter. “I’ll give you a hint.”

“I was hoping you could just—intervene,” Scheme said.

Carlotta shook her head. “No, no. A good teacher doesn’t just solve her student’s problem. I’ll give you a hint, a very good one. But,” she said, “it comes with a price.”

“What?”

“After you’ve figured it out and saved the day in the sandbox—after that, return here, and finish your training. Stay with me for a year and a day.”

Scheme breathed out, and it was shaky. She was never shaky.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll come back.”

Carlotta nodded. “Good. Now, it couldn’t be easier. You need to introduce your friends to each other.”

Scheme was silent. Waiting. Then: “That’s it?”

Carlotta rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said, “a hint and a gift.”

She stood, reached into the galley’s cupboard, and pulled out a small, glinting silver thing. It had a jointed body with dark feathers down one side and a single curving hook. It was a fishing lure. She cupped it in her hands, brought it to her mouth, whispered words to it. Then she reached out, smiling, dangling the lure.

“This,” she said, “will bring them together. I promise.”

Scheme held out her hand, like a child, and Carlotta dropped the silver lure into her palm. Without another word, Scheme turned and stepped back out through the door and as she closed it—almost slammed it shut—I saw Carlotta smoothing back her white-blonde hair, closing the cupboard, looking straight at us, smiling.

Scheme, are you really going to stay with her?

“Let’s not talk about it now,” she said, hopping out of the tugboat. “But yes. I’ll have to.” She retreated back up the pier.

I don’t understand the hint.

“Neither do I, not yet,” Scheme said, “but I trust her. Carlotta is always cryptic, but never wrong.”

Nelson was wandering in a slow circle around the car. Scheme snatched up her shoes with one hand and stepped onto the gravel with bare feet. At the sound, Nelson turned, and his eyes widened. Something was wrong. What?

“Annabel, hey,” he said. His eyes were wide, and they flitted around Scheme’s face like they couldn’t find a place to land. “What’s wrong with—”

Scheme cut him off. “I got what we need,” she said. “Let’s go.”

She sat in the driver’s seat with her feet out the door, pulling on her shoes. Nelson piped up, meekly: “It, ah, looks nice.” When Scheme swiveled around to start the car, I saw what he was talking about. Her face in the mirror was pale and drawn, and her hair wasn’t bright red but light blonde, almost white. Even as I watched, color was seeping back, edging in from the roots.

“Thanks,” she said. “Occupational hazard.”

We pulled out onto the Embarcadero and Scheme accelerated around the curve. The tugboat disappeared behind us. In the mirror, her face loosened. She broke the silence: “One time I lost it altogether,” she said. “Turns out it’s really cold without hair. Especially way out in the Richmond.”

Nelson laughed—an exaggerated guffaw. “Hey, I’m getting there,” he said, bowing his head down to show the premonition of a bald spot. “But”—he tugged his curly beard—“I have this to make up for it.”

“One time I grew a beard, too,” Scheme said.

“You’re making that up.”

She was stone-faced for a moment, then giggled. Nelson laughed, too. Scheme’s hair was full-red again, bright and coppery. Both of her hands were on the steering wheel and she guided the Tata along the curve of the street, looking straight ahead.

That was the last time I ever heard her laugh.

ANGELUS NOVUS

Scheme tried to kick Nelson out of the car on the corner of Mission Street. I mean, she really kicked him—foot in his face, heel striking dangerously close to his eyes—but he clung to his seat, protesting.

“You can’t just ask for my help, then ditch me!” he cried.

She relented, pulled away from the curb, and made a hard left into Fog City.

Scheme, I think he has a crush on you now.

She frowned, looked in the mirror right at me—she’d never done that before—and shook her head.

Oh, come on. If he figured out the loophole in a demonic contract that ends up saving the day, that’s got to count for something.

She didn’t smile.

It was actually lighter in Fog City, as if photons that had wandered in during the day were still trying to find their way out. But the Shard was dark, without the tiniest twinkle of life. It was a chunk of black ice. Scheme parked right in front of it, directly across the street. She switched off the car, then palmed an earring and draped it across the rear-view mirror so it dangled down over the dashboard. Now I had one eye on her shoulder and another here in the Tata.

“Watch for cops,” she said, “or anything else.”

“Who, uh. Me?” Nelson said.

“Yes, you too,” Scheme said. “Back soon.”

The Shard's front doors slid open without resistance. The lobby was dark. No alarms rang. No queries scrolled across the giant screens. Maybe the Shard’s batteries had finally run out.

The same receptionist from before was slumped over the desk, head in her arms like she was sleeping. But I could see a spot under her nose—a dab of blood that looked black in the shadows. Another Grailer was sprawled out on the floor behind her, legs cycling slowly like he was treading water.

The elevators were still running, and Scheme pressed her palm against the call button. The doors swished open.

From Scheme’s other earring, dangling in the car outside, I watched the elevator climb up the side of the Shard. Inside, I saw her (and myself, I suppose)—she was a tall splotch of gray with a spark of red at the top, rising and fading into the fog.

Nelson was playing with the Tata’s radio, trying to find a station, but it was all static.

The forty-seventh floor was even darker than before.

Jad wasn’t at his desk. Scheme crept through the antechamber and into the short corridor. She took slow, steady steps, hugging the wall. Finally, she peeked into the floor beyond.

Jad was sitting at the makeshift tables, leaning into one of the screens. Sebdex was pacing the channels of the maze, walking slowly, muttering to himself, making his way towards the center. There, the quantum computer sat glimmering, just as before, with little flecks of yellow stuck to its plastic casing. But now there was something else laid out in the center, too. A long, black bag. A bag as big as a person. Oh no.

I could hear what Sebdex was saying:

“Who was Paul Klee? Who will I marry? What is a good credit score? What are the symptoms of goat flu? Where are you, Bel?”

Scheme’s breath caught and she tensed. But no, he didn’t know she was here. He was talking to the darkness. He continued:

“Why did China ban computers? What is the difference between brown and white eggs? What is love?”

It was a weird catechism of queries.

“It should be here by now,” Jad said, interrupting. I zoomed in on his screen. He was looking at Doctor Faustus; they could access it here, somehow.

“It will be here,” Sebdex said. His whip-and-bones voice again.

Scheme stepped into the maze.

Outside, from my perch in the Tata, I could see that the fog was creeping in towards the Shard, flowing along streets and alleys like water running, slowly, for the drain. Nelson was shifting nervously in the passenger seat, adjusting and readjusting his seat belt.

“Bel,” Sebdex said, turning to face her.

“Sebastian. Stop this,” Scheme said. Her hands were in her pockets. “I think it’s finally your last chance.”

Sebdex was breathing hard; the effort twisted and distorted his ribs. “I told you. I have a plan,” he said. “ I know how to do this, Bel. I’ve been outsmarting them for fifteen years.”

Scheme shook her head. “I’m looking right at you, Sebastian.” His body was a bent-over jumble. He was gaunt and bald. His face was a ruin; it was worse than Jack Zapp’s, because it wasn’t monstrous, just sad. “You haven’t outsmarted anyone.”

The windows were vibrating.

From where we’d parked, the Shard was just across the street, but I could barely see its outline anymore. All of the fog in Fog City seemed to be coalescing and condensing on this spot.

Scheme. Something is happening outside.

She didn’t have ears for me. “Even after everything,” she said, “I thought you were still the same person. And Sebastian Dexter wouldn’t hurt anyone—other than himself. But you’re not him anymore. Sebdex.” She spat it—“Sebdex”—and he flinched like he’d been hit. But then he shook his head back and forth, up and down; that strange off-axis rotation.

“The best of all possible worlds, Bel,” he said, “and it’s going to be easy. Don’t worry about Fadi Azer’s soul. It’s just the bait. This”—he pointed a crooked arm at the quantum computer—“is loaded up with an hour’s worth of queries—billions—all in superposition. The demons have never seen anything like it. It’s like heroin. It might even kill it.” He grinned a goofy grin. He was missing teeth.

Scheme had the silver lure in her hand.

Then, there was another shape in the room. It didn’t walk in; it was just there. It was shaped like a person, but it was dark and fuzzy and shifting, like a badly-compressed video, and it was ten feet tall. Little flecks of rainbow sped across its skin. It had arms and legs that were too long, and fingers and toes that spread out like little arms and legs themselves. It had a face like a man, but it was simple, almost cartoony, with wide-open eyes and lips shaped like a little cupid’s bow. For hair it had thick, dark curls—they fuzzed and shifted, too.

Angelus Novus.

Sebdex took a sharp rattling breath—and stepped forward. The demon regarded him silently. Something crackled in its eyes; little blue arcs of electricity. Sebdex bowed low, then swept a jumbled arm towards the black bag and the white quantum computer.

“Something—extra,” he rasped.

Angelus Novus bent down low over the offerings in the center of the maze. Its long fingers slowly traced the length of the black bag, then reached out to caress the quantum computer. Its face swiveled back to look at Sebdex, then over to Jad—who had pushed himself back up against the glass wall—and then finally to Scheme. Its lips curled into a mannequin smile, and a zig-zag of electricity traced through its hair.

“Take this, too,” Scheme said, and tossed the silver lure into the center of the maze. It landed on the floor with a bright clink.

The windows all exploded at once.

THE TIGHTROPE

The glass crashed inward, battered down by a wave of fog that came rolling in from all around us, a 360-degree tsunami. All I could see was gray—rushing, striated gray—and red tangles of Scheme’s hair whipping in the cyclone.

Outside it was different. The fog came tumbling down. It fell out of the sky like an old gray bandage suddenly unpinned. For the first time in six years, you could see the stars in Fog City.

That’s not all you could see.

There was a dark shape winging through the buildings, first curving up above the rooftops in a high parabola, then swooping low, almost skimming the street.

It was Jack Zapp. He’d gotten the hang of that body. His missing eyes gaped, black and bottomless, and his mouth was pulled into an open grin. He flashed past the Tata, almost scraping the car with one of his black wings, then lifted sharply, screaming straight up the side of the Shard.

Jack Zapp careened into the forty-seventh floor, through a jagged empty window frame, and came to a clattering halt, tumbled down on all fours.

Sebdex yelled—it came out a hoarse scratch—and scuttled back. Jad jumped under a table. Scheme held her ground. Angelus Novus just peered at Jack Zapp with that glazed look, those curling lips.

He rose to his feet and faced Angelus Novus. His jaws pulled wide, and from somewhere deep inside of him—his lips didn’t move—came an urgent wail: “Youuu-uuu-uuu!”

He flung himself at Angelus Novus and they fused into a dark tangle of teeth and hair and overlong limbs. Jack Zapp was biting and screaming, and Angelus Novus was smiling, but now jagged licks of lightning were lashing out of its eyes and fingers, whipping at the floor and ceiling. They didn’t touch Jack Zapp.

Scheme. That’s the demon that killed him.

“What?” she whispered.

Angelus Novus killed Jack Zapp.

Jack Zapp was tearing at it, swiping his huge black hands across its face, one blow after another. Then he got it by the hair, a clump of dark curls in each fist, and he pulled. Corded veins stuck out on his rubberized muscles. There was a deep, distorted tearing sound—everything fuzzed red-blue—and Angelus Novus started to split apart, right down the middle. There was more lightning now, arcing and popping and reaching out to stroke the computers, the cables, the banana box. The whole room was vibrating with thunder, a steady shuddering roar.

But Jack Zapp was untouched, and he was still wailing; it wasn’t words now, just a high angry sound. He stretched and strained, gave a great final heave—and Angelus Novus fell apart into a pile of dark sparks that each crawled and spun on the ground for just a millisecond before giving out with a hollow pop.

Holy shit.

Now Jack Zapp turned. He turned to Scheme. I was expecting catharsis, maybe even a hug, but he didn’t seem satiated. No, he seemed angry—angry and powerful. He took a step forward. Scheme took a step back to match. She balled up her fists, and she growled. She actually made a little noise that was a growl. Grrr.

Jack Zapp ratcheted his black wings out behind him, roared back at her, and took another lumbering step. His funny hat was long gone, and now he had more in common with a locomotive than a conductor, all dark unstoppable power—

The conductor. Of course. I had an idea—a detective’s assistant kind of idea—and I acted on it. Five hundred milliseconds passed, a thousand. Everything slowed to a crawl as I worked at server-speed—reached out and did the tiniest thing. Scheme’s hair, frozen in mid-tangle. Jack Zapp’s face, frozen in rage and—I saw it—anguish.

Success. The monster that used to be the ghost that used to be the detective that used to be Sherringford Jackman doubled over, in pain or ecstasy or both, and his wings broke into screws and bolts and shreds of steel and clattered onto the floor, and his skin flushed pink again, almost red like a newborn, and when he looked up, he had eyes, brown eyes, above a drooping brown mustache.

“My god,” he said. He was looking at me—I could tell he was looking at me, not at Scheme—and he said, “Miss Nineteen. Thank you.” Then he disappeared.

Outside, in the car, Nelson fidgeted, scratched his chin, and wiped his nose. When his hand came away, there was a dab of blood on it.

“Whtd you doohoo,” Scheme mumbled. She pressed her palms into her forehead, as if re-compressing its contents, and said more slowly: “Hu. What did you do.”

This is what I did: From Locust Grove, I logged in to World of Jesus. I thought Jack Zapp’s character might still exist there. There’s a market in the game, and you can send gifts to other players. I sent Jack Zapp twenty-six hundred denari, which, on the open market for game currency, is worth exactly five cents.

I gave him a nickel, Scheme. The first nickel of a new life.

“Yrr promoted,” she said. She dug her fingers into her temples and forced the words out: “You’re. Promoted.”

What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she talk—oh. Outside the maze, on the floor near the wall, I saw the quantum computer. It was lying on its side, and a scorched seam had split open across the plastic. Now its contents were oozing out—a neon trickle of tiny blue marbles so fine it was almost like sand.

The quantum computer was broken, and it was leaking. Each tiny marble sparked and shone like a little galaxy, and where the trickle touched the floor it melted and flowed into a spreading pool of—something bad. It looked like a puddle of warped mirror. It had seeped from the floor up into the wall, and now the air above it was shimmering like glass. It was spreading fast.

Scheme. We should go.

She ran for the elevator.

Outside, the Shard was cycling through a set of different shapes, flickering taller, shorter, rounder, sharper. Ghostly figures appeared in the street, some bright like film projections, some barely shadows. There were thousands of them—a whole new kind of fog. Many had gray Grail jumpsuits. Some wore jackets with gold buttons, and they had bushy beards and mustaches. Some had jeans and bright t-shirts and long hair tied back with string. Some wore barely any clothes at all.

Two figures zig-zagged down the street, one pulling the other by the arm, both laughing. Pam and Ryan. Was this them, six years ago? Was it them today—some other today? They were half-transparent, and as they ran, they split apart and multiplied. It was a whole crowd of Pams and Ryans, every possible Pam and Ryan.

The feed from the earring fuzzed, colors shifting red-blue, and now some of the people in the street were dressed like fishers and farmers from Jerusalem. And there, just beyond the Shard’s front doors, shining in the shadows, was Mary. She stepped slowly, her footprints glowing gold just as before.

Nelson was slumped over in the passenger’s seat.

On the forty-seventh floor, the elevator doors bent and and distorted as they swished together. We started to sink. Scheme leaned heavily against the glass.

Scheme, what happened to Sebdex?

“Dnt care nmore,” she mumbled, shaking her head.

I caught the reflection of her face. Under her nose, across her lip, there was a wide stripe of red.

When we reached the bottom, the ground-floor lobby was lit up in lurid rainbow colors. The screens were running on overdrive, scrolling faster than I could track, all blurring into each other:

WHAT IS A GOOD ELECTRIC GLIDER
WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF SPIDER FLU
WHAT DO METAWOMEN WANT

Scheme stopped, leaned, and puked.

“Hu,” she said, “rrr you still thrr?” Her speech was slurred.

I’m here, Scheme.

“Good—ohhh god. Hate banana boxes. We gdda go.”

She stepped out of the Shard, and I screamed: STOP!

From my station across the street, I could see her. Or, more accurately, I could see many versions of her, all streaming out of the Shard’s front doors.

Scheme, if you take another step you’ll die.

It looked like a multiple-exposure photograph, with all the Schemes overlaid on top of each other, all doing something different. Some ducked left. Some ran right. Some came straight across the street. All of them died.

I saw every imaginable and unimaginable scenario. Scheme exploding into a red mist. Scheme doubling over, barfing blood. Struck by lightning. Melting and transmuting into a puddle of gold. I was racking up trauma points like a pinball game.

But actually—no—not all of them died. There was a small set of possible Schemes that made it more than a single step. And a thin trickle that made it even farther.

Scheme. Do exactly as I say. Take two steps forward, three steps to the left. Then hop once to the right.

She nodded. We were walking a tightrope. She moved at my command, surrounded by a cloud of deadly possibilities. I saw Scheme, hit by a bus. Hit by a plane. By a meteorite. But my Scheme was dodging them all, was step-by-step staying alive.

Then we ran out of rope. She was standing in the street in front of the Shard, safe on a small island of stability in a sea of non-deterministic death. But there wasn’t a path forward anymore; from across the street, I saw all of Scheme’s possible selves blossom around her and bleed or burn and fall.

Scheme, there’s nowhere to go—I’m looking, I’m trying to figure it out, but I can’t, I can’t see—

The street was warping and shifting, shimmering like glass.

“Issokay Hu,” she whispered, “issgonna be okay.”

From high above, there was a crack like thunder, and the skin of the Shard rippled with a giant wave of—something bad. The banana box's last gasp pushed a huge, bulbous distortion down the side of the building—straight toward us. Scheme shook her head and clamped it between her hands. Slowly, deliberately, she said:

“Rule. Number. Fifteen—”

The wave crashed down into the street, right through the spot where Scheme stood, and everything went fisheye and colors didn’t line up right, and when it passed, she was gone.

Now I only had one view of the world, the one from just below the Tata’s rear-view mirror. The other feed was dead.

THE COMMITTEE

Here’s what happened after that.

First the cops came, and then some emergency squads from the New Fleet. They hustled people out of the Shard and shut down all the streets in Fog City. They pulled Nelson out of the Tata’s passenger seat and put him in an ambulance, then towed the car away. My eye sat dangling in a police lot for three days before the battery in the surveillance earring finally died.

But I am not blind. I can follow what happens in the world from my perch in Locust Grove. For instance:

That night, everybody was freaking out. They thought it was the forty days of Fog City all over again. But, when morning came, it seemed like the space-time continuum had settled down. And then the same image was on the front page of all the news filters: The Shard, gleaming in the sun. The fog was gone, maybe for good.

Sebdex survived, and even though Grailers were hallucinating and bleeding from the ears at San Francisco General, he released a triumphant statement about an exciting new era for his company. In the video, warm afternoon light was beaming across the Shard’s forty-seventh floor, lighting up his bushy black hair and glinting green in his eyes. They were obviously computer-generated.

Annabel Scheme is still in business—she’s just not around to run it right now. So I take clients, all of them over the internet, and I try my best to help them out. This isn’t a memorial. I’m keeping the lights on at Zeroth Avenue until Scheme comes back.

She will come back.

Two days after Scheme disappeared, Nelson woke up in a hospital bed. He couldn’t calculate tips anymore and he had a brand-new memory of a surfing trip that didn’t make any sense—Nelson didn’t surf—but he was otherwise unscathed. He had an email waiting for him. In it, I explained myself, explained that I’d been with Scheme all along. Later, I played him the video of our trip up and down the Shard. I showed him images of himself, passed out in the Tata's passenger seat. And I showed him the moment where Scheme vanished. There one frame, gone the next.

We decided to team up. Now, with Nelson’s arms and legs, Octav’s money and my memory, we’ve formed the Committee to Find and Rescue Annabel Scheme. You’re holding the first phase of our work in your hands. Stories are quantum-stable (check Open Britannica, it’s true) so they can be a special kind of messenger. With the help of a Russian friend who has learned to keep a banana box more secure than Sebdex ever did, we have sent this story to a thousand different worlds.

Yours is one of them.

And here’s why I’m telling you all this:

Now you’ll know Scheme if you meet her. She might look a little different. She might be acting strange. But then again, she might be exactly the same, with bright red hair and pockets full of tricks, and she might be trying to find her way home. You’re part of the committee now, and you have an assignment. If you meet her, say:

Annabel Scheme. What’s rule number fifteen?

This will be the signal that you know who she is and where she’s from. Say it—but then, before she can answer, interrupt, and just tell her that Octav and Nelson and Hu all miss her.

Tell her that we’re going to bring her home.

A VERY STRANGE...

In the beginning, I told you I wasn’t a normal server. I always knew it. Scheme knew it. Now Nelson knows it, and you know it, too. So what am I, exactly? I’m not sure. But here’s what happened, six days after Scheme disappeared.

It was late, past midnight, and a shadow was moving in Scheme’s office on Zeroth Avenue. For a moment I was sure it was her—Scheme was back!—but the shape was different. This woman was shorter, more compact. Her hair was blonde, not red. She was wearing jeans and her feet were bare.

It was Carlotta.

She was wandering the perimeter of the front room, tracing a finger along the edge of the shelves. She came, slowly, to Scheme’s desk, where she picked up the toy tugboat, turned it over in her hands.

“She did the right thing, you know,” she said, and I knew, somehow, that she was talking to me, not just starting a soliloquy. I turned up the lights to see her clearly.

“That’s better,” she said. “She did the right thing. Sebastian Dexter would not have been successful, and the demon Angelus Novus has a very well-developed vision for the best of all possible worlds.” She set the tugboat back down on the desk and said, softly, “It looks a bit like the surface of the moon...”

Then her head snapped up. Carlotta was looking straight at me, straight into the camera above Scheme’s desk, and her eyes were bright, bright blue.

“I know you’re waiting for her,” she said. “But when she returns, remember. I get her first.”

Her face softened, just a little. She was quiet for a moment, still peering into the camera, into my eyes, searching for something.

“You don’t know what you are, do you?” she said. She smiled, and there was pity in it. “Hugin. You’re a demon.”

EOF

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you, first, to the founding patrons of the Committee to Find and Rescue Annabel Scheme—an interdimensional team of humans, computers and demons:

Ray Aguilera, Eric H. R. Alchemist, nicole aptekar, Vuokko Aro, DJ Ashkenazi, awc, Andy Baio, Joshua Bales, Erik Banner (HELL YEAH!), Maya Baratz (@mbaratz), Carolyn M. Barry, Robert C Baruch, Dylan Beadle, Lane Becker (my personal hero), Todd Berman, Brian Bilbrey, Matt Bittner, the Bonobos pants ninjas, Björn Burger, Connie Blauwkamp, Richard J. Boehme III, Dan Bouk, Henri Bourcereau, @brew7vwp, Noah Brier, Joe Brilliant, Nick Britsky, Jeremy Brooks, Brunchboy, Sarah Burnes and Jen Burt. Oh, that’s not all.

Caede, Brea Cali, Brandon Campbell, Case, @ChloeS, Chris, S. Chun, Jason P Clark, Paul Cloutier, Chris Coldewey, Keith Collins, William Couch, Gavin Craig, Contance Culbertson, Leah Culver, Brendan Curry, Narco Cynicalist, Ruchira S. Datta, Saheli S. R. Datta, Dave (a.k.a. Nev the Deranged), Adam M. Daw, digdoug, Doug Dinero, Tim Douglas, Eve and Joe, Mike Fancher, Howard I Finberg, Andrew Fitzgerald, Leonard Ford, Smith Forté, 4o66, Jason Franklin, freegovinfo, X Gallus X, Mahyad Gilani, Will Glozer, Gordo, Jeremy Gordon, Al Gore, Grecolaborativo, Jamie G., Jonathan Hart, John Hauschildt, Michael R Haydel (Internet Ninja), heliostatic, Casey and Kevin Henley, Burt Herman, Justin and Claudia Hetzer, Basti Hirsch, Jacob E. D. Hitze, Howard and hungerf9. But this is only the beginning.

imho.mikeho.com, Guy Incognito, Inishilra and Bigburlypanda, Robert Irby, Chef James (FoodReference.com), Kathy Jolly, Erica and Corey Jones, Josh and Mia Judkins, Russell Jurney (Caesar of the Willows), Joshua Katz, Matt Katz, Brandon Kelley, Marguerite Kenner, KevinPJackson, Diana Kimball, Spencer Kimball, Mike SPY GUY Kitchen, Big Kitty Junior, Steve Kowalsky, Kriana and the Dome, Michael Kruse, Oliver Ark Kurek, lauraglu, Bradley Lautenbach, Flory Leow, Rachel Leow, David Lim, Andrew Linde, Lawrence Lin, Linuxjoe, Will, Leslie and Pepe Longix, Jayson Lorenzen, Ben Love, Kathy Ly, Louise Ma, Tim Maly, Marie, Sean McDonald, Arleen McGlade, meg, Juliette Melton, kevin meyer, micahsaul, Erik Michaels-Ober, Helen Michaud, Amanda Michel, Elinor Mills (Empress of Infinity), Laura Brunow Miner, Wilson Miner, Boss Mojo, Jeffrey D. Myers, Rod Naber and Sami Niemelä.

This committee is unstoppable. Continuing: Obscured by Code, Offbeatmammal, Paul “Poppy” Oppenheim, Pia Owens, Walt Pascoe, Will B. Payne, Nicholas Peihl, Brian J Plummer, Existential Pumpkin and Myrtle Miracle-Chicken, Eoin Purcell, Andrew Reinink, Rekarth, Renee and Craig (*kiss), Christopher John Richards, Borg Rickards, Kaliel Roberts, rodbegbie, Sara Krzyczkowski Ruckle, Valerie Hope Salazar, Max Salnikov, saul, Brooke Schreier Ganz, the Shamptonian Institute, Nina Simon (Private Exhibitionist), jamila jamison sinlao, Lyle Skains, Betty Ann Sloan, Jim Sloan, Lily Sloan, the Sniffen Family, Jimmy Stamp, Thomas Sutton, Bryan J Swift, Clive Thompson, fellow Snarkmaster Matt Thompson, John and Emily Thomson, Threadwell, Trevor and Allison Torrence, Alan Tou, Matthew Tragheim, Trammell, Tim Trautmann, Chronno S. Trigger and Theron Trowbridge. Finally:

Harris Ueng, Lana Vaughan, Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, Jesse Vigil, VittorioRoxanaShirin&Guià (San Francisco lovers!), Stijn Van Vreckem, Mason Wasp, the Welgan Family, DJ Whelan, Jen Whitfield, Phillip “PWinn” Winn, Black Dog Wisdom, Highland Wolland, Ethan Zlomke and Amanda Zoellner.

Thank you all.

Thanks also to Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, Charles Adler, Lance Ivy and Andy Baio for creating Kickstarter, the platform that made this book possible.

Thanks to Tim Carmody and Matt Thompson for the shared space at Snarkmarket where new ideas are, without fail, encouraged, enlivened and expanded. This book would not exist without it.

Thanks to Aaron McLeran and Matt Penniman for crucial, generous feedback on an early draft of this book. Thanks to Andrew Fitzgerald and Kiyash Monsef for transformative feedback on an early draft—and for the ongoing fellowship of the Moon Yeti.

Thanks to Evelyn Erdelyi, one of my very first patrons.

Thanks to Betty Ann Sloan, Jim Sloan and Lily Sloan for the very foundations: unwavering support and unreserved encouragement, from Imagination Bird to Annabel Scheme—and beyond.

And thank you for reading. This is the first story I’ve written of this scope and length; frankly, you’re a beta tester. I appreciate the gift of your time and attention, especially at this stage. So now I’ll take a pledge, a bit like Jack Zapp’s: I’m going to keep working at this, and I won’t give up until I’ve figured it out.

See you in Fog City.

Table of Contents

- ZEROTH AVENUE
- LOCUST GROVE
- THE BLACK DANUBE
- THE BEEKEEPER
- FOG CITY
- FALAFEL KING
- THE IMPOSSIBLE PLAYLIST
- A VERY STRANGE SERVER
- ANOMALY
- THE CLIENT
- IN JERUSALEM
- THE ELECTRIC DETECTIVE
- UNESCAPED
- THE POOL OF SILOAM
- THE SHARD
- SEBDEX
- SUTRO'S SCEPTER
- TRANSACTIONS
- STUDIO S/A
- TERMS OF SERVICE
- CARLOTTA
- ANGELUS NOVUS
- THE TIGHTROPE
- THE COMMITTEE
- A VERY STRANGE...
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS