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  "This is interesting," muttered Richards, and reached to push back his fedora, as was his habit when he was thinking. His hand came away when it found the hat missing, and he remembered it had gone to nothing when he'd dived into the Gridpipe leading here, the rogue k52's shanghaied cyber-realm.

  Richards was not terribly surprised when he discovered he could not make a new hat. A mirror caught his eye. He walked over to it. There was just enough light to make himself out. He was in a copy of the simulated body he normally wore in virtspaces: middling height, mid-forties – twenty more years than his actual age – brown hair with the beginnings of a widow's peak. He had the face of a gumshoe, tired and worn out on too much whisky and too many worthless women; brown trenchcoat of a gumshoe; threadbare suit of a gumshoe – now wet with vomit; red tie of a gumshoe. Richards liked mid-twentieth-century detective stories; he was a security consultant and a security consultant was a kind of detective, so he styled himself after their fashion. It was all play; he was far more than that.

  He missed his hat. And this body felt far too real. And he stank of sick.

  "Bollocks," he said.

  A squeaking of shoes approached from the left-hand archway. A figure dressed in full butler's regalia appeared and made its stiff-backed way into the entrance hall. Its head was the last thing to resolve itself from the shadows. The head of a dog.

  Grizzled black hair covered the dog's head. Sharp ears twitched alertly on the crown. The muzzle was long, the bastard offspring of auntie's Scottie dog and the big bad wolf. Red eyes smouldered. Dog-headed man was a misnomer; it was more like a dog in the shape of a man, a man-shaped dog, thought Richards. He found it strangely disturbing, a feeling he couldn't shake.

  "Good evening, sir," said the man-dog. It sniffed distastefully at Richards' disarray.

  "Nice outfit," said Richards.

  The man with the dog's head inspected itself, looking in turn at its frock coat, well-tailored trousers with a light pinstripe, charcoal waistcoat, pocket watch and shoes.

  They look uncomfortable, thought Richards, but what the hell kind of feet did a man with a dog's head have anyway?

  "It is the uniform of my office, nothing more," said the dog. "This is my master's house."

  "Yeah, well. It's natty," said Richards.

  The dog stared at him levelly, panting lightly. His breath smelled superficially of mint but it covered meat, drool and things left best uneaten. "Might I ask what you are doing in my master's house?"

  "Beats the shit out of me," said Richards.

  "There is," said the dog, clasping its hands behind its back and flexing its spine, "no need for language like that. This is my master's house."

  "And your master would not approve?"

  The dog looked from side to side, ears twitching independently of one another, listening to something Richards could not hear.

  "Nice place he has here. No doors."

  The dog looked at the bare walls framed by wood as if it were news to him. "It is my master's house," said the dog. "I guard the entryway. It is my master's house. Good evening, sir."

  "Right. You're not very bright. Let me see, limited responses… Hmmm. You're on a loop, aren't you? Hey! Hey!" Richards snapped his fingers. "Where is your master?"

  The dog quirked its head. Suddenly it was standing right in front of Richards. "This is my master's house. Might I ask what you are doing, doing here in my master's house?"

  "We've done this bit before," said Richards. He turned away to examine his options, but the dog was in front of him wherever he looked.

  "I am afraid I must ask you to leave." The dog shifted again. Another flicker; it became huge, clothes ripped, clawed hands dripping blood. "This is my master's house. Might I ask what you are doing, doing here in my master's house?"

  "I'll be leaving," said Richards, but he could not move.

  "Get out, I say, get out, get ooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut!" The dog's voice broke into a howl and it threw its head back. The howl increased in volume until the ornaments rattled. Richards screwed his eyes shut against the torrent of dog breath and spittle.

  Dying is becoming an annoying habit of mine, he thought. But he didn't die.

  The howl abruptly stopped. The temperature dropped, and he was confronted with a sense of openness.

  "Outside? I'm outside," Richards said, and cracked open an eye.

  He was outside. Score one for the great detective, he thought.

  A knocker clinked on its plate as if a door had been slammed, although it was attached to a bricked-in space where a door wasn't. It was a lonely noise, rapidly swallowed by the night. The outside lantern, a baroque thing held aloft by a grimacing centaur, went out, rolling up its tongue of light.

  "k52, what the hell are you playing at?" said Richards. He sighed as his eyes adjusted themselves to the dark; stupid human eyes with poor night vision. Ornamental woods gone wild surrounded the house. Wind rustled through trees silhouetted against a starless sky, black marbled purple and blue, a pregnant moon hanging large, its light casting the landscape in stark monochrome.

  A loud crack came from the woods. Richards wasn't sure if he should feel afraid or not, but he did; he could not disengage himself from his fear. Being at the mercy of his emotions was new to him. He decided to play it safe and get back in, to break the dog-man's limited programme and find out what the hell was going on. He half-expected k52 to burst from the trees, and that would be trouble.

  The house was massive but not large, its solidity giving it a weight far beyond that of its dimensions, and Richards went round it in no time at all. A cruel iron fence kept him at a distance. The stone was so dark it sucked in what little light there was, so he couldn't make much out. He looked back to the woods. The trees rattled, branches beckoning him.

  Richards grasped the fence and heaved himself astride it. He fell awkwardly. His trailing leg snagged, cloth and flesh tore with equal ease on an iron barb, and he landed gracelessly on a flowerbed full of trash.

  "Shit!" he hissed. He scrambled up again. His leg throbbed dully. He probed the wound. "Ouch," he said. His fingers glistened black in the moonlight. "This is far too realistic."

  Blood dripped down Richards' leg as he limped to the wall and felt along it for a door. As inside, so outside: no windows or doors. The frames were there, but the spaces between were as unseeing as skin healed over empty eye sockets. He reached a space where the moon shone unimpeded by trees and looked harder. A nightmare scene was coaxed from the shadows, painted where window glass should be. A ghastly face with too many teeth, flaking eyes fixed on his. Night drew in closer, hunting. Sibilant promises came from the windows. Richards caught the odd word.

  "That's not very nice," he said.

  He went round the house again inside its skirt of iron. He swore and grumbled as his feet encountered hard rocks and unmentionable softness. All the windows were the same, daubed with horror. When he was sure there was no way in, he scrambled back over the railings, more carefully than before.

  An owl shrieked. Too loud, too close.

  "Woods it is after all," he said. He was trying to feel brave. Richards felt fear ordinarily all right, but not in the way that men did, and not for the same reasons. When he did feel fear as men do, he did it because he wanted to, and it was fake; it could be deactivated. This could not. This was people fear, glandular fear. He glanced behind him, enjoying the novelty of ungovernable emotion even as it quickened his heart and impelled him to hurry down the drive. The crunch of gravel underfoot made him wince. A gust of wind tickled the trees. Dead rhododendron leaves rustled in the understorey; a sterile, woody scent carried from them.

  He made sure he kept to the middle of the road, away from the fringes of the woods, just in case.

  Richards turned from looking behind himself just in time to walk into a musty barrier, as solid as a brick wall, in a dirty fur coat.

  Richards spat hair from his mouth and looked up, and up.

  Heavy paws dangled like mallets
from long arms. Close-set eyes burned cold in a face as long as a wet Wednesday. Teeth glinted in the moonlight. A tiny Roman centurion's helmet sat atop a blockish head. A damp, heavy smell hit Richards like a billiard ball in a sock.

  "A bear," said Richards, savouring the cocktail of mild surprise and terror his new body furnished him with.

  "Damn right," said the bear. It jabbed a dagger-long claw at Richards' face. "By all rights I should eat you, sunshine."

  "I'd rather you didn't," said Richards.

  The bear didn't. "It's your lucky day. No devouring of prisoners," it said. "Regulations."

  "Oh, good," said Richards.

  "But hey!" The bear smiled a forest of teeth and held up a claw. "I can do this." The bear punched him full in the face, and Richards found the stars the sky was missing.

  CHAPTER 3

  Where's Waldo?

  "No. Absolutely not." Chures pushed his chair back from the conference table and stood. He leaned forward, pressing his fingertips onto the table's active glass surface.

  "The decision's been made, Agent Chures," Deputy Director Sobieski, his perfect eugene face hard, stressed the title. "Klein has all the relevant clearances, and a valid freelance license. His partner's in the Reality Realms right now. Klein is qualified and invested. Surely you can see he's a good choice."

  The others in the room watched in silence: Veronique Valdaire with her phone Chloe on the table in front of her, a fat Texan called Milton with USNA Homeland Security – the big guns, at least so far as human influence went – a fastidiouslooking VIA agent who'd introduced himself as Swan, Henson, a stout man in military fatigues from USNA Landwar, and a beefy-looking Boer, a UN attaché who was too important to have offered his name. There were a handful of others round the table, but Otto could tell the spectators from the players easily enough. The ones who didn't matter wore the fixed expressions of people who did not wish to get involved in Chures' argument.

  "We have plenty of qualified people of our own," said Chures.

  "We do. And Klein here took out a whole squad of them without too much trouble," said Sobieksi, "while he was saving your ass, if I recall. And which of them has a resumé like this?" Sobieski tapped at the table. The area in front of Chures sprang into life, 2D and holo files opening up on the table and above it, detailing Otto's career as a soldier and security consultant. Chures didn't look at it.

  "Sobieski…"

  "It's Assistant Director today, in here, Chures," the eugene warned.

  Chures gritted his teeth. He did not care to be put in his place. "Assistant Director Sobieski. He's too close to the Fives."

  "That's another reason he's in, and that is not our call. The Three Uncle Sams and the machines in the UN have swung it. The Director agrees. The numbers want him on board, so he's staying."

  "Since when did we do what the machines say? It's one of them we're supposed to be bringing down. The VIA works on equal partnership terms between man and machine." He looked around the table. "It did when I signed my life away. Has something changed?"

  Sobieski leaned forward. "Yes, it has, and that's all the more reason for the numbers to want all this resolved quickly. We're all on the same side, in this and all other matters. Don't forget that, Chures."

  Chures stood his ground. "Sobieski, let me take my own team, my own men…"

  "Assistant Director, Chures, Assistant Director." Sobieski sighed. "Chures, sit down."

  Chures kept his grey eyes fixed on Otto as he sank into his chair. The wounds were healing. Wounds inflicted on him by his doppelgänger, an advanced cybernetic android intended to replace him under the direction of k52, others taken at the hands of men in grey, mercenaries of some kind, as he'd scoured the southwest of the old US for Valdaire.

  His olive-brown skin was marred with yellow and purple bruising, and a geckro membrane bandage covered his neck where the remains of his treacherous AI personality blend Bartolomeo had been removed. He'd had a manicure; his jewellery, expensive clothes and shoes were back. His twin custom uplinks, one behind each ear, had been replaced, but it'd take a lot more than a well-tailored suit to cover his hurts. He was smarting from the beatings he'd taken, and that he'd been saved from death by Klein, a man he could never trust.

  "As far as the rest of the world is concerned, we're going to be doing our job," said Sobieksi. "The VIA is putting all of its efforts into preventing the spread of k52's influence into the rest of the Grid. We'll have teams working alongside the National Guard and UN forces to secure the Realm House. It will remain locked down, but short of actually nuking the place, we've no way to get k52 out. That's where Klein and his partner come in."

  "His partner? How can we be sure Richards is not in league with the renegade?" said Chures, angry.

  "He warned us, Chures."

  "It's a bluff, Sobieski, Klein's a risk…"

  "There will be no more disagreement on this matter." A voice intruded, that of Xerxes, a Class Five AI, like Richards, like k52. Xerxes was Uncle Sam 3, one of the AI triumvirate that ruled the United States of North America in all but name.

  A holo beamed in via isolated tightbeam, away from the Grid where k52 might see, and followed the voice. Xerxes wore the face of an earnest government man. It was appropriate, for, though he was no man, he was a third of the government of a third of the world, and the VIA agents and EuPol specials and FBI and EuSec spooks and CIEA ghosts in the stateroom and watching via link reacted accordingly. The holo, fizzing with solar interference, manifested at the head of the table. Otto didn't react. He'd got too used to the Fives and their cheap melodrama. They were far too human, in their way.

  "We desire that this issue be resolved immediately," Xerxes said without preamble. "It has been determined that the freelance security consultant Otto Klein, along with Doctor Veronique Valdaire, will accompany VIA Agent Santiago Chures. Klein is to have equal authority to Chures. This is a multilateral effort. The UN has agreed. That is all." The holo winked out.

  "There, that settles that," said Sobieski. He pointed at his subordinate. "They are always listening, Chures, so don't go against what they say or you'll be off this case altogether. As for you, Klein –" Sobieski looked at the German "– don't think I'm entirely happy about this. This is a VIA affair, not work for mercenaries. But you've got yourself a Five for a buddy and as we're seeing here, they're all real tight with each other." He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head in pure alpha display – the eugenes could help their display behaviour about as much as a monkey could. "On the other hand, this is Five business, Klein, so I guess if you fail or succeed you'll be answering to them. And for that I'm relieved; rather you than me."

  Otto wondered what Valdaire made of the argument. He was glad to have her; without Richards they needed someone who knew the machine world, and, under the current circumstances, better a human than a number. As ex-InfoWar and a renowned AI expert, he couldn't think of anyone more suitable. She sat across the table, mouth thin. She didn't think much of Chures' objections then. But Otto's authority, that had been a surprise to the German; he'd been expecting Chures to be given sole command.

  "Agent Swan, give us the current situation on the renegade," said Sobieski.

  Swan was a slight man in a suit. A suit in a suit, Richards would say, thought Otto. He bobbed his head and stood. It took Otto a moment to realise the guy was a number, dressed up in some fancy near-human sheath. He did not blink – they never remembered to – and that gave him away. He had an info wand in his hand, old tech, but self-contained, safe from k52. The lights dimmed and holographic data filled the centre of the table. Reports, files, video and a large representation of what Otto took to be the Realm House, loaf-shaped top to deepest subterranean bottom, the enormous server farm in the Nevada desert that sustained the remaining thirty-one of the original thirty-six Reality Realms, along with, now, k52's rogue project. Otto had only seen the topside of the facility in the Real; looked like the tip of the iceberg if the map was anything to g
o by.

  "k52 has disabled the entirety of the Realm House's security net," said Swan. Vital nodes blinked red within the complex. "And has complete control over the virtual worlds generated within. Our men have formed a perimeter 750 metres back from the outer fences, just VIA this close in, no National Guard until the outer perimeter. Their systems, as we saw, were easily overwhelmed," said Swan. He waved his wand. Video footage played, machines turned on men, weapons malfunctions, informational blackouts. "He skipped through the Guard's heaviest encryption like it was a field of daisies. Now we're on the scene, everyone out there now is pure analogue, radio voice communication, human hands on mechanical triggers, all interfaced staff have been pulled back. k52 can't do much about that." Swan pressed his lips tight. "But he could do a whole lot more. He has one of the most powerful collections of hardware anywhere on the planet at his disposal, and here's the puzzle: he's not actually doing anything with it."