For a vet of LA like her, it sounded like no big deal: Richter five or six, hardly enough to slosh the water in the bathtub, even if it did send enough dilute mud out of Elliott Bay to flood the Waterfront Park and knock out the street-cars. But it sent the locals into a spin, coming so soon after the Rainier eruption.

And anyhow just then Joely had bigger problems on her mind.

Like negotiating her pay at Virtuelle, which still hadn’t been settled even when the company’s big eighteen-wheeler had turned up at her apartment block in LA, and the movers had loaded up everything, right down to her car, for God’s sake.

She had gone in pitching at eighteen hundred bucks a week, but the executive who hired her, in the end, managed to lowball her to fourteen hundred. And on top of that she would lose twenty per cent to the employment agency Virtuelle were recruiting her through, which in turn meant that she was engaged not as a staff employee but as a perma-lancer, no health benefits or pension or stock options. And by the time Uncle Sam had taken his cut she was left with little more than eight hundred a week, which felt like a defeat, even if it was more than she had earned in her twenty-seven years…

But she went to Seattle anyhow.

She spent a day exploring, and she immediately fell in love with the place.

She liked its topography, the way it was folded over the compact hillsides above its bay. She liked being able to drive from snowcapped mountains to a yacht-filled Sound in half a day. She liked the Elliott Bay Book Company, whose boast to stock every book in the world she was not able to invalidate with her standard three-title test set.

Work was a little iffy, though.

Virtuelle’s campus — all paid for by the unexpected profitability of the world’s first successful virtual reality e-zine — was a carpet of neat quadrangles of grass, separating three-storey office buildings like children’s blocks, gleaming blue glass, identical save for their red numbering. The bottom storey of each building was an open car lot, so that the buildings were fat, top-heavy boxes held up there by skinny little beams of reinforced concrete, all of it a little rickety in the eyes of a Californian.

She spent most of her first day sitting in a cubicle before a blank screen, waiting for her magnetic photo-ID key and her e-mail address to be allocated her, without which, as far as she could tell, she didn’t really exist here, and she certainly couldn’t go anywhere or do anything.