“I heard Luty say that he can make any message look like it comes from anywhere,” said Azaroth. “He said the Big Pig is helping him. Brown and a bunch of ExaExa security guys are dressed like police and waiting to squish you. Look in the orphidnet.”

Thuy focused on the ExaExa campus by the San Francisco Bay, south of the baseball stadium. The complex consisted of three linked, windowless buildings. On the north end was the lab, a fanciful dome patterned in an irregular tessellation of brown and white triangles. In the center was the administrative building, a shiny orange box with an entryway set off by green spirals and scrolls etched onto the outer wall, the curving lines rising up to sketch the outline of the ExaExa beetle. To the south was the large, irregular, curved trapezoid of the nanomachine fab, a functionalistic white building with colored pipes and wires writhing along the upper reaches of its outer walls, the underlying walls painted with a gargantuan ExaExa beetle plus the company name, the script Es like backward numeral 3s.

Other than a narrow driveway and the road leading to the loading docks at the southern end of the fab, there was little asphalt to be seen, for the ExaExa parking area was underground. The building sat at the edge of a grassy green meadow, beautifully lit by the slanting morning sun. After all the rains, it was going to be a nice day in California.

Even though it wasn’t yet seven a.m. there, demonstrators had begun to crowd the field. A handful of guys who looked like cops were guarding the loading docks and the main entrance door; they had two large SUVs painted like police cars. Zooming in, Thuy could see that one of the men in uniform was the so-called Bim Brown she’d spoken with.

“Look,” Thuy remarked to Jayjay, who’d tuned in as well. “Their paddy wagons are painted with quantum-mirror varnish on the inside. Real cops don’t do that. The varnish is too expensive.”

“Real cops don’t use SUVs at all anymore,” said Jayjay. “What it is, if Luty gets us into one of those vans, we won’t be able to teleport out.”

“I bet a lot of those demonstrators are Luty’s agents, too,” said Azaroth. “He’s got people snorting nanomachines into their brains to addle them so—”

“How does Luty think he can get away with this?” interrupted Thuy, not listening to the second part. “Aren’t the real cops gonna come, too? And the army and the feds? I publicized all that information about Luty yesterday, dammit.”