His own professional journey, since then, could be seen as the single-minded pursuit of weird stuff, and the shedding, at every opportunity, of all responsibilities that didn’t qualify as such. It had led him into some alarming situations, forced him to make some tricky career choices, but whenever he was questioning it, he would summon forth that memory of Richard and he would try to do what Richard would have done.

And that explained why he was sitting across the table, in the most expensive restaurant in Seattle, from Gerta Stock and the full-time nurse who apparently kept Gerta alive by looking after the tubes and wires hooked up to her body. Gerta appeared to be a transgender woman. She wasn’t that old, but she was a mess physically. Back in his Corporation 9592 days, Corvallis would have been seriously dismayed by what he was seeing, but the accident of Dodge’s will, combined with his laser-focused pursuit of weird stuff, had gradually made him over into a kind of high-tech Charon, assisting dead or dying people across the digital Styx, dropping them off on the far shore, never really seeing what lay beyond it. So he’d had a lot of encounters with desperately sick people, beginning with Dodge and moving on to Verna and others who had found their way into the cloud-based afterlife. Nothing surprised him about Gerta Stock’s physical condition.

He was pretty damned surprised, though, when Gerta Stock mentioned what she did for a living. “I am a musician,” she said. “You’ve never heard my real name, but I know that you have heard my music. I made my career recording music under the name of Pompitus Bombasticus.”

Corvallis knew it immediately. “The last music Richard Forthrast ever heard,” he said.

“Unless they were playing some shit in the elevator,” Gerta responded.

“You saw the video?”

“The kid with the broken arm? On the sidewalk?” Gerta was grinning, showing yellowed teeth and hideous gums, and nodding. Corvallis averted his gaze and spent a moment cueing it up in his mind’s eye: A GIF, just a few seconds long, recorded by the kid’s father. Richard standing next to the kid on the sidewalk, moments before he went into the building to die. The fat, expensive noise-canceling headphones down around Richard’s neck, spilling the music out into the chilly wet autumn air. Clearly playing the music of Pompitus Bombasticus.

“He had all of your stuff,” Corvallis said.

“Made me famous, for a little while,” Gerta said. “I got a gig because of it—did the music for a big triple-A game. Made me enough money to transition.”

“Then what happened? I seem to remember you’ve released a couple more albums.”

“No hits. That was my big break. I blew it.”