Or so Zula had always told herself until the Metatron stated its business: “We have evidence that the Process once known as Dodge’s Brain has been rebooted.”

Zula looked at Corvallis, who shook his head no.

“It has been rebooted,” insisted the Metatron, as if it were savvy enough to read the look that had just passed between the two humans, “and moreover it has interfered directly in work being undertaken at great expense by El.”

“How could you even know that?” C-plus asked, and something in his manner suggested he wasn’t asking it for the first time. “And are we to understand that you are in some sense holding us responsible?”

Zula fished spectacles out of her bag and put them on. It had been a while since she had checked the balance in Dodge’s account, so it took a few moments to find her way around the interface, but then she pulled it up and saw it still frozen at zero. “There is no activity,” she insisted.

“Which is how he eluded us,” answered the Metatron, “by drawing upon resources in some manner we have not been able to trace. But there is no question that a new—or very old—agent is active in the system whose knowledge, agenda, and character are holographically indistinguishable from those of Dodge. We have only become aware of this recently, but he could have been hiding in plain sight, marshaling resources, for years.”

“So what?” Zula asked. “Assuming that is even true?” But she hoped that it was.

“And again, how can you even know such things?” Corvallis added.

The Metatron seemed to ponder it for a little while before answering, “We have been developing modalities of communication between living and dead that are much more effective than any known to you.”

So then it was their turn to be silent for a bit and get their heads around that. Somehow long pauses were easier when talking to a faceless robot, whose posture and movement betrayed no trace of impatience, or any of the other volatile transient emotional states that impelled normal conversation.

“You’re holding séances?” Zula asked. “You have a Ouija board?”

The Metatron was not amused. “In the years before his death, El perceived the need for such improved channels and funded research programs aimed at tunneling through the barrier of Radical Semantic Disconnect. He laid in place infrastructure for such communication to be further developed and exploited following his death. While imperfect, these modalities function well enough for us to understand that the recent activities of the aforementioned Process have created serious disruption to activities being undertaken by El that are of considerable importance not only to him but to you as well.”

This last part was kind of a mysterious assertion that the robot seemed in no temper to elaborate upon.

“Can you say more about the nature of these activities and of how they’ve been disrupted?” Corvallis asked. He threw Zula a look.