The mechanic’s shop is a pristine collection of glass surfaces. External connecting devices and custom-made cases for them, encased in glass boxes, hang from hooks in the wall. Customers mill around, attended to by aerial service bots. Light just bright enough to make everyone feel comfortable, filling the air with soft chatter, shines over everything.

Behind the front counter leans a young man whose eyes glisten with the sheen of cyberization. When Ify draws near, she hears none of the humming and whirring of the gears and machinery at work inside of him and figures his central processing unit must be state-of-the-art. The twinkling nameplate on his chest says VIKRAM.

“You called me with an update?” Ify asks.

A goatee makes his otherwise shaven face more angular. There’s an agelessness about him. He could be fifty years old or just a few years older than Ify. Or he could be a fifty-year-old man in the body of someone who looks only a few years older than Ify. He holds up her Bonder with one hand, elbow pressed to the glass counter. Tattoo ink swims in designs over his forearm. “The update is there is no update. You have a minute?”

Ify surprises herself with an exasperated sigh. “Sure.”

Vikram leads her behind the desk and into a back room with the complete opposite ambiance of the store floor. In here, lamps illuminate small, seemingly random circles of a space otherwise smothered in shadows. Tools litter workspaces, and Ify finds herself stepping awkwardly over Bubble Wrap and empty boxes and glass cases strewn all over the floor. Nimbly, he makes his way to his desk, where mini projectors and tablets and small, cube-like data processors lie in a neat semicircle. He sits in a hoverchair and seems too preoccupied to offer Ify a seat until he extends his arm and a chair speeds out of the shadows and lands close enough for Ify to fall into beside him.

He connects the Bonder to one of the data processors, then connects that to a larger device and enables a wireless connection that Ify can feel in her temple, connecting the Bonder to half a dozen devices on the desk. It powers up, and up from one of the tablets pops a holographic projection of its screen. The fingers of Vikram’s right hand break apart, and his wired fingertips blaze across a separate touchboard. Down scrolls the text of the Bonder’s data. A swirl of letters, symbols, and numbers.

“I wasn’t able to recover the lost data, but I was able to stop the virus from eating any more of it.”

“Virus?”

“Yeah. Once you connected the Bonder to an outside device, whatever was in there just went nuts and started eating all your data.” He shifts in his seat. “You sure it didn’t contract a virus from any of your other devices?”