“His lawyer first. The call was timed so that Pluto’s heart was already stopped by the time anyone arrived. The last will and testament, the disposition of remains, all of that stuff was laid out and waiting. The medics showed up fifteen minutes later, saw that the EKG was flatlined, and decided not to smash their way in. Now it’s kind of a standoff. They’re waiting for the coroner.”

“He’s already dead, being the point. The medics have no purpose here,” Zula said. “It’s just like Uncle Richard except much better organized.”

“Um, this is neither here nor there, but it turns out he had cancer,” Corvallis said. “It’s in one of the documents that he left for us to find.” He held up a folder and rattled it. “Colon. Spread to the liver. He’s known about it for a year.”

“Long enough to build this?”

“I guess so. But apparently this is a more recent project. That guy over there is his doctor.” Corvallis pointed to a man in a white coat who was having an animated discussion with a burly rural fireman. “He says that Pluto was seeking aggressive treatment, doing everything he could to fight the disease, until a few months ago.”

“ACTANSS,” Zula said.

“Yeah. Maybe a coincidence but  . . .”

“But probably not. I’d love to know what’s playing on that VR rig.”

“Pluto had ideas,” Corvallis said. “He sketched them out for me in a bar at ACTANSS. He has been—had been—thinking about the thread of consciousness. Do you take your memories with you into Bitworld? Do the people wandering around that town remember where they came from?”

“Or are they like souls in Hades, who have drunk from the waters of Lethe and forgotten all?” Zula said. “I’m guessing the latter.”

“Well, they certainly don’t show a lot of interest in talking to us.”

“No, they don’t!”

“So, what happens when you cross  . . .”

“The Styx?”

“Is there, like, an unbroken thread of awareness, such that you just pick up where you left off?”

“Well, what we saw at ACTANSS tells us something,” Zula said. “The Landform is obviously a re-creation of the general kind of environment that those people were familiar with here in Meatspace.”

“Not up to Pluto’s standards,” C-plus cracked.

“But nothing could be,” Zula finished the thought.

“So I’m thinking that the VR rig is Pluto trying to influence the outcome. He wanted to go to sleep with ideas, images in his short-term memory that would somehow be captured by the scan and rebooted fresh in his mind. He didn’t want to drink from the waters of Lethe.”

“Well, I guess we’ll know soon enough,” Zula said, “when we get him out of there and find out what’s showing on that thing.”

Corvallis reached into the folder and pulled out a sealed envelope. “This is for you.”