The pharm began to hum softly, creating a sedative tailored to my current biochemical state, in a dose in accordance with my intended sleeping time. The synthesizer inside used an array of programmable catalysts, ten billion electronically reconfigurable enzymes bound to a semiconductor chip. Immersed in a small tank of precursor molecules, the chip could assemble a few milligrams of any one of ten thousand drugs. Or at least, any of the ones for which I had software, for as long as I kept paying the license fees.

The machine disgorged a small tablet, still slightly warm. I bit into it. “Orange flavored after a hard night! You remembered!”

I lay back and waited for the drug to take effect.

I’d watched the expression on his face – but those muscles were palsied, uncontrollable. I’d heard his voice – but the breath he spoke with was not his own. I had no real way of knowing what he’d experienced.

Not “The Monkey’s Paw” or “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

More like “The Premature Burial.”

But I had no right to mourn Daniel Cavolini. I was going to sell his death to the world.

And I had no right even to empathize, to imagine myself in his place.

As Lukowski had pointed out, it could never have happened to me.

Chapter 3

I’d seen a 1950s Moviola once, in a glass case in a museum. Thirty-five-millimeter celluloid traveled a tortuous path through the guts of the machine, moving back and forth between two belt-driven spools held up on vertical arms behind the tiny viewing screen. The whine of the motor, the grinding of the gears, the helicopter whir of the shutter blades – sounds coming from an AV of the machine in action, showing on a panel below the display case – had made it seem more like a shredding device than any kind of editing tool.

An appealing notion. I’m very sorry … but that scene has been lost forever. The Moviola ate it. Standard practice, of course, had been to work only with a copy of the camera original (usually an unviewable negative, anyway) – but the idea of one slip of a cog transforming meters of precious celluloid into confetti had stuck in my head ever since, a glorious, illicit fantasy.

My three-year-old 2052 Affine Graphics editing console was incapable of destroying anything. Every shot I downloaded was burned into two independent write-once memory chips – and also encrypted and sent automatically to archives in Mandela, Stockholm and Toronto. Every editing decision that followed was just a rearrangement of references to the untouchable original. I could quote from the raw footage (and footage it was – only dilettantes used pretentious neologisms like “byteage”) as selectively as I wished. I could paraphrase, substitute, and improvise. But not one frame of the original could ever be damaged or misplaced, beyond repair, beyond recovery.