“I didn’t like your friend at first,” Maeve said, “but I’m warming up to him.”

“That is convenient, Maeve, if I may take the liberty of addressing the lady by her Christian name, because I will require your permission. Your complicity in utterly destroying your reputation.”

“It’s already destroyed, haven’t you seen a bloody thing?”

“It is not sufficiently destroyed yet,” Pluto said. He glanced at the screen of his laptop. “The total number of unique slanderous and defamatory statements that have been made about you, on all of the blogs, boards, and social media networks being tracked by my bots, currently stands at a little more than seventy-three thousand. Peak traffic occurred yesterday, at four point five kiloBradens.”

“What’s a kiloBraden?” asked Maeve, taking a personal interest since her last name was Braden.

“A Braden is a unit of measurement I coined for my own purposes, equal to the number of hostile posts made in an interval of one hour. It has now slumped to just over one hundred Bradens as the focal point of the attack has shifted to your mother and . . .” Pluto’s brow furrowed as he read something from the screen. “Someone called Lady?”

“Her Lhasa apso,” Maeve sighed. For the dog had been heard yapping incessantly on the soundtrack of Maeve’s mother’s front-stoop press conference, and was now receiving death threats.

“Anyway, we need to get that up into the megaBraden or preferably the gigaBraden range in order to achieve saturation,” Pluto intoned, “and we need much wider ontic coverage.”

“Ontic?” Corvallis asked, so Maeve wouldn’t have to.

The jet’s pilot entered through the door that communicated with the tarmac and gazed at Corvallis in an expectant way. “One more,” Corvallis told him, since there’d be paperwork. To Pluto he said, “Passport?” and then regretted it.

“A passport and a visa are required for entry to—” Pluto began, a little confounded by the question.

“Never mind. He has a passport and a visa,” Corvallis called to the pilot.

After they had walked to the plane and got settled into their seats, Pluto resumed the previous conversation as if nothing had happened. “This kind of thing has to be gone about in a systematic way, so that nothing is missed,” he said, now staring out the window at a fuel truck. “Partly through direct study of dictionaries, thesauri, and so on, and partly through brute-forcing archives of defamatory Miasma postings, I have compiled what I think is a pretty comprehensive ontology of execration. A mere lexicon doesn’t get us anywhere because it’s language-specific. Both in the sense of relating to only one language, such as English, and in the sense that it only covers defamation in a textual format. But many defamatory posts are now made in the form of images or videos. For example, if you want to call someone a slut—”

“We don’t need to go there right now,” Corvallis said.