Pluto had bought the property ages ago and lived in the house—a fairly dull bit of 1970s architecture gone somewhat mildewy—while gradually, over a span of decades, turning the garage into a fully equipped science lab and machine shop. Neighbors had looked on with consternation as heavy trucks had negotiated the puddle-spattered dirt driveway towing multiton machine tools on flatbeds. Deliveries of bottled gases and cryogenic fluids had become commonplace. No one really knew what he did there. The answer seemed to be: whatever he felt like at the time. He’d gone through a phase of making various kinds of lava by melting stones with huge oxy-fuel burners of his own design. He had built rocket engines and tested them in his backyard.

Today one of the garage doors had been hauled open to reveal his latest project, which was an exceptionally complicated suicide machine hermetically sealed behind a wall of bulletproof glass plastered with prominent signs and legal documents.

On the hour-long drive up here, Zula had been given some of the details over the phone, so she knew approximately what to expect. On the other side of that glass wall, Pluto was reclining on a gurney in the middle of the science lab. Everything was illuminated brilliantly by the cold white light of LEDs. So it was possible to see a great many tubes. His body and all of his head, except for his face, were swaddled in some kind of thing that looked like an expeditionary sleeping bag, and most of his face was covered by a virtual reality headset hooked up to its own computer. The sleeping bag—or perhaps “dying bag” was a better term for it—was pervaded by a network of tubes. Whatever was in those tubes was cold, judging from the jackets of frost that had gathered on them. The tubes ran away to a boxy device in the corner that, one had to guess, was some kind of a chiller. Lots of smaller tubes ran into the thing, snaking round the curve of Pluto’s jaw and down into the bag, where presumably they were connected to IV lines. There was a control system too, embodying a snarl of cables at least as complicated as the plumbing system; all the cables terminated in the back of a workstation, an old-school tower PC with a flat-panel screen. Some of the cables led to the chiller box, others to much smaller devices mounted on the IV lines. And one led to a landline telephone.

“Where do you even buy one of those nowadays?” Zula asked, focusing on the latter.

“China. Some businesses still use them for specialized purposes. Sort of like fax machines hung on forever and ever.”

“That’s how the police were summoned?”