Forced to await developments on both these cases, and unhindered for once by the mystery that was R.I. Gaines, she investigated the massacre in the basement, working in her office with holograms made at the scene. The vics, viewable from any angle, lay about in louche poses. Even their smell was replicated. Forty-eight hours after the attack, a faint aerosol of lymph had still hung in the air. The evidence team’s conclusion: someone had done a job on them. After that, causation itself dribbled away in predictable chains of confusion,  each ultimate  cause itself shown to be proximate  in some other context until everything danced off into metaphysics. Evidently it was a Preter Coeur kill. The room  was full of clues to that, the fading signature of hormonal  switchgear, the wounds traceable to biomineral weapons – self-sharpening polycrystal mosaics derived from nacre, perhaps expressing as fingernails?

Nanocamera coverage having tanked so completely during the actual crime, it was expected the assistant would go down there in person, if only – as the sixth floor put it – to familiarise herself with the venue. But she never did. She remembered the event on the back stairs. The thought of the basement made her uneasy, and remained  with her even in the Cedar Mountain  immersion  tank on C-Street, where, as Joan the 1950s wife, she dreamed  a baby came through the wall in her bright, new, airy, shades-of-primrose kitchen.

First something went wrong with the paintwork. It turned matt olive in the top corners; then in patches on the walls themselves, which  spread  quickly  until  everything  was covered.  Then  she noticed that on the kitchen shelves her carefully arranged tins of anchovies and Parma ham had been replaced with stale wrapped sandwiches and  bits of half-eaten fruit. These items caused her both disgust and anxiety. Her husband Alan might come in at any moment and see them! But now the kitchen doorway had no door; the kitchen window opened on to a weed-filled lot where it was always raining. Damp had penetrated the cheap formica cabinets, covering them with fibrous ring-shaped blemishes. Looking up at the wall, Joan saw that a slightly more than life-sized vulva had emerged from it like a crop of fungus. It wasn’t quite the right colours. The labia had yellow-brown tones, and the rigidity of a wooden model. A body was attached, but less of that had emerged from the wall. It was still emerging, in fact. Joan felt that it might take years to squeeze through.  And while the vulva clearly belonged to an adult – she was so embarrassed! – the body was much younger. It still had the fat little belly and undeveloped ribcage of a baby. The vulva presented in the same vertical plane as the wall, but the body and the face were foreshortened  and leaning back from it at a wrong angle for the anatomy to work.