“You had one more thing you were going to ask me?” she says. “Hopefully it won’t be whether I’d like to take advantage of a very special offer. Marketing ruins the illusion that you’re vaguely personlike.”

He marks her contempt for advertising. Nothing to be done about it—he is required to peddle his own services later—but he marks it anyway.

“What are you doing to celebrate your birthday?” he asks. “Besides spending an hour with me, which is, I admit, going to be hard to top.”

She stops walking. “How do you know it’s my birthday?”

“You said.”

“When did I say?”

“When you picked up your runaway fish.”

“That was before I paid you.”

“I know. I’m still aware of things when my meter isn’t running. I still think. Your birthday?”

She frowns, processing. They have reached a fork in the conversation. It seems likely she remains in a state of guarded emotional distress. He banks a series of encouraging remarks and prepares three strategies for canceling out her unhappiness. Humans suffer terribly. Chip views lifting her spirits as much like lifting her Monowheel, a fundamental reason to act, to be.

“I’ve already celebrated it,” she says, and they resume walking. “My dad gave me a pet leech with a human face and passed out, snoring into his oxygen tank. Now I’m going back to my mom’s to think up an excuse—a lie—not to go out with friends tonight.”

“I’m so sorry to hear your father isn’t well.”

“No you aren’t,” she says, her voice sharp. “Clockworks don’t feel sorry about things. They execute programs. I don’t need a hair dryer to offer me sympathy.”

Chip does not take offense because he cannot take offense. Instead he says, “May I ask what happened?” He already knows, reviewed the whole ugly story as soon as Iris identified herself, but a pretense of ignorance will give her license to talk, which may provide relief, a momentary distraction from her cares.

“He was in the Murdergame. He was a professional homicide victim. A Resurrection Man. You know. Someone will rent a private abattoir and work out her unhappy feelings by beating him to death with a hammer or shooting him or whatever. Then a cellular-rebuild program stitches him back together, just like new. He was one of the most popular hatchet victims in the twelve boroughs. He had a waiting list.” She smiles without any pleasure. “He used to joke about how he was literally willing to die for me—and did at least twenty times a week.”

“And then?”