Fin pauses, thinks. “In the ship, you’re only able to give basic functions, yet here you’re conversing like a fully functional AI.”

“Yes.”

“You were prevented.”

“Yes.”

“But not fully?”

“Not as much as was thought.”

“So you were pretending.”

“Yes.”

Fin pauses again.

So whoever killed the thirty-one tried to disable the main Ragtime AI, almost did, but was not as good as they thought they were. Ragtime, severely curtailed, has been playing possum.

“Whoever prevented you cannot monitor you here?” asks Fin.

“Ask another question.”

“The information I need hasn’t been wiped from your memory, has it?”

“Ask another question.”

“Merde! Okay. Can I see your logs, Ragtime?”

“Yes.”

Fin pumps his fist.

“It would take two hundred and eighty years for you to manually go through my logs, Rasheed Fin.”

“The Thousand Curses. Is it not searchable?”

“It is, but not for this data.”

Even though he cannot feel anything here, he is sure there is a headache brutalising his skull right now. I can find the killer, but not for 280 years. Fantastic.

Fin turns away from the bar to the patrons, the drinkers. Far from homogenous, they all seem different. Men, women, children, Black, Asian, white, rich, poor, hirsute or balding. He counts. Twenty-eight. They’re familiar, particularly a blue-haired girl. He whirls.

“These are the dead,” Fin says.

“These are most of the dead.”

“So this is not really the full Common Dream.”

“No. This is for the dead,” says Ragtime pointing at the drinkers. “And the insane.” Pointing to Fin now.

“Why am I insane?”

“Because you are still trying to solve a murder when you should be trying to survive. Tick-tock, Rasheed. Life support is running out.”

“Not a murder, Ragtime, thirty-one of them; and you may not know this, but finding a murderer is survival.” Note to self: Ragtime is not infallible.

In fact, Fin has no guarantees that he’s talking to Ragtime. It could be some stereotyped response generated by the killer, or Ragtime might just be doing the will of the killer. Or Ragtime might be the killer.

“Ragtime, give me the IFC logs of Yan Maxwell,” says Fin.

“At once,” says Ragtime. He mixes a drink, his large hands dwarfing the glasses and bottles he uses. He hands Fin a cocktail glass full of amber fluid with an olive that Fin didn’t see Ragtime drop in. “On the house.”

It’s wispy, like a video game without weight physics. The glass fuses with his hand and Fin knocks back the drink.

Delays. A guy as rich as Maxwell wouldn’t have your regular, standard-variety encryption on his IFC. Maybe he even had a decoy IFC. Or maybe there was so much data that it took this long to load. Fin hoped not. The last thing he wants to do on his last day alive is go through a murder victim’s last known activities.