All of that was sorted. The consortium had been running smoothly for a long time now. Long enough to hire consultants who pointed out that SLUZA was a terrible name and talked them into using ALISS in all customer-facing communications. C-plus kept tabs on ALISS with his counterparts in Zelrijk-Aalberg, and when weird problems came up—which was increasingly rarely—they could usually wait to be ironed out at the next ACTANSS.

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?”